Hurricanes Free Agency Recap
I have a love/hate relationship with free agency day. There’s a barrage of signings & most of them are either laughed at or forgotten about for the other 364 days of the year. Still, you feel kind of left out if you root for a team that was inactive on July 1st, and usually you’re disappointed unless you’re coming off a Cup win. Everyone wants to get better and doing it through a thin free agent pool is like working with a Chopped basket (and not a good one). The foundation is usually built years beforehand & this is just scrambling to fill in the pieces.
Unfortunately for Carolina, they had to be active, just from the sheer number of players they lost in the first hour. Even as a jaded fan, watching the minutes go by with the higher impact players signing onto other teams was a little stressful. Their plan with keeping Jake Guentzel fell through, they anticipated losing one of Brett Pesce or Brady Skjei & ended up losing both, everybody knew Teuvo Teravainen was gone & one of their main impact forwards (Martin Necas) has been in trade talks everyday. The lone returning member from this free agent class being Jordan Martinook, who seems like he’s going to be in Raleigh forever & he got a nice payday on top of that.
Then the moves started happening & most of them had some foresight, not too different from the Orlov signing. The frustrating part about my relationship with this team is I can never get too mad at them when something doesn’t work because I can usually see what they’re going for. They knew they were losing at least one top-four defenseman to free agency, so they signed Orlov to a deal where he’s overpaid as a third pair guy for a year & then slides up into Skjei’s spot the next season. Then Alexander Nikishin takes over for him after that. This year, their main priority was taking care of Jaccob Slavin & bringing in succession plans for Brent Burns when he departs after next season in the form of Sean Walker & Shayne Gostisbehere. Factor in Jalen Chatfield’s new contract & the defense is taken care of for the next couple seasons with some flexibility to get better if you need to.
We’ll get into the players they signed in a minute, but this is kind of what I was talking about earlier. There’s some kind of method to their madness and Tulsky even said that they’re not done (and looking at their forward depth chart, they can’t be). Will it work? If anything, I’m expecting them to take a step back to being more of a wild card team until they find a solution up front, but I’ll continue to assume the people in charge here know what they’re doing until they give me a reason not to.
The Slavin Contract
Outside of trying to keep Guentzel, the main priority for Carolina was getting defenseman Jaccob Slavin re-signed before his contract year. I wouldn’t put him above Aho in terms of the team’s hierarchy, but he is a cornerstone piece & someone they are not going to find a replacement for if they tried. They ended up settling on an 8-year deal with an odd cap hit of $6.46 mil. It’s barely more than he’s making now, so getting him at that price for what might be the rest of his career is a big win for the team.
The only obvious concern with this deal is how it ages. The wall comes for all defensemen and it’s usually brutal for those who play heavy defensive minutes with a lot of penalty kill duty. Slavin isn’t the most physical player in the world, but he does take a lot of hits from the number of pucks he retrieves & his agility is a big part of his game. How much that goes away as he gets older is when this contract could look scary for Carolina, but the cap hit is low enough that if he becomes more of a 2nd pair guy, the bridge to Nikishin is there & they could spend on someone else if they wanted.
It’s hard to say how Slavin will age because every player is different. Christopher Tanev played heavier minutes than Slavin ever did & he’s still as good as he ever was. TJ Brodie finally hit that wall this year at 34 and the worst case scenario for Carolina is San Jose’s Marc-Edouard Vlasic. One of the league’s premier shutdown defenders for most of his career, MEV signed a $7x7 mil. contract with the Sharks right before he turned 31. The drop for him after that was sudden, steep and hit the Sharks like a freight train. Micah’s site illustrates it better than I ever could.
Vlasic & Slavin were similar players at their primes, but this doesn’t mean their careers will go the same. Vlasic had more NHL miles under his belt by the time he hit 30 compared to Slavin & he also had a rough adjustment period from when the league went from heavy cycle to play to more rush play. Forwards got quicker & more deceptive & some defensemen had a tougher time adjusting than others. Slavin’s speed & stickwork might save him from a similar cliff, but that also hinges on him remaining healthy. MEV is a good skater too, but just from watching him, he was never one to be the first on pucks and relied on his partner more for breakouts even when he was a top shutdown guy. He could pivot & square up against forwards to kill entries, but maybe that got tougher when the league got faster?
Should be noted that MEV salvaged his career a bit, but he also saw his minutes reduced around 2020 when it became obvious he couldn’t handle the heavy matchups anymore. Carolina will eventually get to that point with Slavin, but hopefully near the end of the deal instead of 2-3 years in.
The New Guys
The Canes main signings were the pair of defensemen, Sean Walker and returning Shayne Gostisbehere. Both signing three-year deals at a little over $3 mil. each, which is about what Jalen Chatfield signed for about a month ago. Both are similar-ish players in that they’re small puck-movers and it’s a different archetype than what they lost in the two larger, penalty kill workhorses in Brett Pesce & Brady Skjei.
Walker & Ghost Bear wouldn’t be the first puck-movers the team signed who eventually conformed to their “no controlled exits ever” strategy. In fact it looks like Gostisbehere was already with the program in his one year with Detroit. Walker is the higher upside pick of the two even if he’s 29 years old. He got lost in the shuffle with the Kings & the Flyers were playing him 20+ minutes a night. He flourished. Excellent at both ends, using his skating to join the rush & defend entries. What the Canes lost in size, they gained in mobility. Ghost also defends his blue line well, but he’s mostly out there to be a complement to the forwards & be a threat on the power play. Whether or not he can do that with this upcoming forward group remains to be sign.
So, I can see what the Hurricanes plan is with their defense, but the big question for next year is who takes on the old Skjei/Pesce matchups. The two of them ate pucks like it was their job (because it was) and played some incredibly heavy minutes on the penalty kill. Slavin is obviously capable, but Orlov & Chatfield also showed some chemistry together & were the team’s best defense pair for the final two months of the season. The caveat being that it came against weak, third pair competition. The assignments they’re getting this year will be much different. Also gotta wonder if Scott Morrow figures into the mix somehow.
William Carrier
The most surprising move Carolina made was signing William Carrier for six years at $2 mil. per year, just because throwing out long-term contracts for depth forwards is something they don’t do. Carrier’s always been an interesting player, though. He plays more minutes than your typical fourth liner & has a lot more skill than you’d expect from a 220 lbs. winger.
Fans wanted this team to add size & I think this is one of the best players they could have gotten if they were after that. He’s also an odd-player in my A3Z tracking because he is usually among Vegas’ leaders in shot assists every year when accounting for ice-time but he never racks up any assists on the scoresheet. Watching him, he does kind of handle the puck like a grenade & makes a lot of quick, one-touch passes so I can see why other fourth liners might have a tough time scoring off those. His own scoring rate isn’t bad, though.
For whatever it’s worth, every coach Vegas coach seems to love Carrier so we’re about to see a lot of him for the next six years.
The Others
Eric Robinson and Tyson Jost seem like AHL depth to me, but they got one-way deals & were in the NHL for most of last season. Both guys looked like really solid players 2-3 years ago & I really liked Robinson when he was in Columbus. High-motor player who adds some speed to a checking line, also a nuisance on the penalty kill there. Jost was someone I liked at times in Colorado but they eventually moved on from him & his ability to create any offense vanished. Teams seem to think he’s a defensive specialist because he can’t score but his on-ice results say otherwise. Not sure how much we’ll see of him in the NHL next season. Carolina has a gluttony of bottom-six centers so it’s going to be a tough lineup for him to crack.
Depth Chart
So, this is where we’re at two days into the off-season. Tulsky said that they aren’t done and it’s pretty clear to see why when you look at that forward corps. If anything they probably need to subtract before they add. There’s a gluttony of third and fourth liners with one potential top liner potentially on the way out. I never thought left wing would be such a weak spot for this team, but Teuvo leaving left a bigger hole there than expected. Jesper Fast is recovering from a neck injury and Kotkaniemi is better as a center than a winger.
They mentioned they want to keep the door open for rookies & I don’t hate the idea because they have a chance to stick here if this is what they’re rolling with come September. Nadeau & Blake have the best shots, but I also want them set up for success rather than expect them to carry a line centered by Jack Drury, Kotkaniemi or whatever is left of Evgeny Kuznetsov. It’s just not a good situation right now, but hopefully there’s some resolution here before October. I can’t imagine the front office looking at that forward group & not wanting to change anything.
Around The League
Tampa’s been the team to watch for me. Losing Stamkos is a bad look, but the way they reshaped their team on the fly is interesting. The Syracuse Forward Well has started to dry up, but they’re still having decent success with plugging defensemen into their lineup as long as Hedman is their rock. They deal Sergachev while he has value on an expensive contract & reallocated the money to making their top line even more nuclear. They’re still incredibly top heavy, but I like the shake up.
After the season, I said that Seattle’s problems was their offense was one-dimensional with all of their chance/goals coming off the rush & their chance volume disappearing as a result. They signed Chandler Stephenson & Brandon Montour to monster deals, which kind of doubles down on the whole rush offense thing. They didn’t really have an offensive threat from the blue line after Vince Dunn, so Montour fills a need even if it is for a lot of money with a weaker supporting cast than what he had in Florida.
Speaking of rush offense, Oilers games are going to look like air hockey but with humans next year.
Nashville’s only had three 40-goal scorers in their entire franchise history and two of them are Filip Forsberg. They just doubled the number of that on their roster with Marchessault & Stamkos.
This was the summer to be a free agent if you’re a tall, veteran defenseman that hits or blocks a lot of shots. Even then, Alec Martinez somehow only got a one-year deal. I know he’s older but still.