Calgary Flames sign blueliner Joni Jurmo to entry-level deal (two years, $850K)

The Calgary Flames have locked in another prospect to an entry-level contract. The club announced on Sunday afternoon that defenceman Joni Jurmo has signed a two-year entry level deal worth $850,000 at the NHL level. The deal begins in the 2024-25 season.

Jurmo is a 21-year-old left shot defenceman from Espoo, Finland. He was selected by the Vancouver Canucks in the third round of the 2020 NHL Draft and was moved to the Flames as part of the Elias Lindholm trade. The Flames had a June 1 deadline to sign Jurmo or relinquish his NHL rights. They chose to sign him. (Jurmo was under contract with KooKoo for the 2024-25 season, but under the Finland/IIHF transfer agreement with the NHL, there are mechanisms in place to get NHL-drafted players out of European contracts.)

Via Postmedia’s Danny Austin, Jurmo will be joining the Wranglers on Tuesday.

Presumably, this will be on an amateur try-out deal as his ELC doesn’t begin until the fall.

On one hand, Jurmo’s spent the better part of the past four seasons in Finnish pro hockey, playing with four different Liiga teams and one team in the second-tier Mestis. He hasn’t exactly set the world on fire offensively, posting just 28 points in 168 Liiga outings. That said, European teams tend to prioritize older players with better usage and deployments, and so younger players – especially those expected to bolt to North America before long – tend not to play very much. (Case in point: Flames prospect William Strömgren was a fringe player in the SHL due to many of these factors.)

It’s hard to develop if you don’t play very much, but Jurmo also didn’t perform well enough offensively to cause his various teams to deviate from this usual pattern. We’ll see if Jurmo can take advantage of an opportunity in the Flames’ system to change some minds in the scouting community about his game.

With Jurmo’s signing, the Flames have 32 players under NHL deals for 2024-25. More specifically, five players will potentially be entering the Flames’ entry-level system as first-year North American pros: Jurmo, Hunter Brzustewicz, Sam Morton, Parker Bell and Samuel Honzek.