Happy Canada Day, friends. Today is the beginning, sort of, of free agency. To sign available players, NHL teams are about to spend obscene sums of money that are still somehow suspiciously low when compared to the other big-four sports.
Washington general manager Brian MacLellan articulated the team’s needs simply: a third-line right wing. The team is reportedly about to sign F Richard Panik to a four-year deal worth around $2.5 million annually. The team appears to have been priced out in the race to sign F Brett Connolly, who has been linked to Florida for around $3.5 million.
Although no deals could be finalized until noon on Monday, there was a ton of buzz on Sunday night, which Ian recapped and I’ll summarize here:
There were also trades. Anaheim traded F Nicolas Deslauriers to Montreal for a pick, and Florida traded G James Reimer to Carolina for G Scott Darling and a pick, and Montreal traded F Andrew Shaw to Chicago for picks. Toronto completed a multi-player trade with Ottawa, swapping D Nikita Zaitsev for D Cody Ceci and others.
One acronym you may see today is AAV, average annual value. That’s basically the player’s salary per season, and therefore their cap hit. A resource we’d recommend for today’s activity is Evolving Wild’s contract projections, which take informed guesses at the term and salaries of contracts for free agents. Before we begin, please keep in mind the mantra for free-agency spending:
And now, let’s do it.
That’s about it for now! We’ll run new stories for further developments.
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