The Tampa Bay Lightning traded defender Nikita Nesterov on Thursday to the Montréal Canadiens for Jonathan Racine and Montréal’s 2017 6th round pick. Racine is a non-scoring, big penalty minute AHL defender who is not waiver exempt, but would pass through easily.
Nesterov is on a cheap $725,000 contract that expires this summer. He will turn 24 in the spring, and is not waiver exempt. He is a left-shooting defender, and we know that right-shooters are more rare, but Tampa still seems to have believed, likely correctly, that they could not get Nesterov through waivers, and they have other defenders they wanted to play instead of him.