The Chicago Blackhawks signed forward Tanner Kero to a two-year contract extension Thursday.
The deal will keep Kero with Chicago through the 2018-19 season. Financial terms of the deal were not immediately known.
Kero, 24, has scored five goals and seven assists in 38 games this season in a bottom-six center role. He scored one goal and three points last season in 17 games after spending the majority of the season with the Rockford IceHogs of the American Hockey League.
Kero, an undrafted player out of Michigan Tech, is in the last year of a two-year, $1.85 million contract with a $667,500 average annual salary cap hit.
“He’s reliable in a lot of ways,” Quenneville told CSN Chicago. “He puts himself in the right spot, down low in his own end, underneath coverage, and seems to be useful in killing penalties as well. There’s more offense in his game that hopefully can come around and add to his reliability defensively.
“We feel he’s done a good job of being a guy in the middle you can use and we like what he’s brought to our team in a position where, [earlier in] the year, I don’t know if he was forecast to be a regular like that. But he’s become more and more reliable, or used more.”