St. Louis Blues wing Vladimir Tarasenko is to sign a lockout deal with KHL team SKA St. Petersburg on Friday, the team said in a website statement.
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.
But the lockout hit before he had the chance to accrue any ice time with his new team.
The NHL and the players’ association failed to agree terms on a new collective contract, and the passage of Saturday's deadline sparked a flurry of signings, the highest-profile of which are Evgeni Malkin's return to Metallurg Magnitogorsk and Alex Ovechkin’s to Dynamo Moscow.
Tarasenko teams up with New Jersey Devils forward Ilya Kovalchuk, who inked a deal in St. Petersburg on Tuesday and was assigned the captaincy.
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.
Tarasenko began his fourth season in Sibir last year before he was traded to SKA in January.
