St. Louis Blues wing Vladimir Tarasenko is to return to his former KHL team SKA St. Petersburg during the NHL lockout, SKA said Monday.
The move fills up SKA’s quota of three NHL lockout signings after the big-spending St. Petersburg team signed Columbus Blue Jackets goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky and New Jersey Devils forward Ilya Kovalchuk, who has been made captain.
“The forward Vladimir Tarasenko will become a SKA hockey club player Monday,” the team said in a website statement.
His signing ends an on-off saga in which Tarasenko had been due to sign for SKA on Friday, only for the team to cancel the move, saying that the player’s agent had laid down new conditions that SKA could not accept.
Tarasenko, 20, was a first-round draft pick for the Blues in 2010 and moved to St. Louis in the summer after racking up 25 points in 30 games for SKA last season in the KHL.
Tarasenko is the son of hockey star Andrei Tarasenko, who played for Russia at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer and was head coach at KHL team Sibir Novosibirsk when his son made his debut there in 2008.
SKA fielded a locked-out player for the first time Sunday as Kovalchuk played in the team’s 3-1 win over last season’s champion Dynamo Moscow, picking up an assist.
