It’s independence day here in the USA, but that’s not stopping free agency from flowing.
Merry July 4th; don’t blow your hand off.
Free Agency has finally had it’s largest piece in Nikolaj Ehlers taken off the board by the Carolina Hurricanes; a very annoyingly comfortable fit for a team that already pried K’Andre Miller off of New York.
Does it work for a pickup? Absolutely. He slides perfectly into the 1st line winger spot. Is it gonna stop them from losing in 4-5 games to Florida? Probably not, but maybe it’ll be competitive this time.
Wednesday and Thursday were kind of slow as the number of decent free agents continues to dwindle. Gustav Nyquist went to Winnipeg, Dmitry Orlov went to San Jose, Brent Burns went to Colorado, Anthony Beauvillier went to DC…the pickings were slim to begin with, but we’re already getting towards barrel scraping time. The most value add you can get right now is either in something like a reclamation of an old player like Jeff Skinner or hope that someone like Hudson Fasching, who I’d imagine a great number of analytics departments are trying to sell to their GMs, will be as quietly good on a 4th line as he was in New York in spite of a lack of production.
The real money now is in RFAs; many teams threaten to do offer sheets, but realistically the enormously risk averse nature of most NHL Teams and GMs will mean that there might be one or two overall.
It’s a shame too; there’s some pretty decent players kicking around in the RFA sphere; Dylan Samberg is quietly the lynchpin of the Jets defense and if they miss that about him they’re gonna have an awful time; the Marco Rossi saga in Minnesota continues to seem like it’s going to drag out into the breadth of the summer, Kaapo Kakko finally seemed to find a groove with Matty Beniers and the Kraken sure would love to keep any sort of offensive momentum they otherwise didn’t have, Luke Evangelista is like The One Exciting Part of the Predators organization right now and boy would it be funny to watch them panic over an offer sheet.
There’s hope that since a bunch of teams still feel like they didn’t get everything they needed for next season, that transactions like this will be their way to salvation. Hopefully it’ll be fun!
The alternative is a long, boring summer after Dev camp.
Anyway, how do you plan on celebrating the 4th? What’s the closest you’ve ever gotten to blowing up a limb using legally obtainable fireworks?