Available UFAs, Colorado coaching search and Jimmy Vesey (Puck Daddy Countdown)
(Ed. Note: The column formerly known as the Puck Daddy Power Rankings. Ryan Lambert takes a look at some of the biggest issues and stories in the NHL, and counts them down.)
5. Still being on the market
The pickings start to get pretty slim around this time of year, as far as free agents go, but there are still a few guys who might be able to help you out a little bit.
Guys like Jiri Hudler really ought to have an NHL contract by now. Jiri Tlusty still doesn’t have a contract. Maybe it’s a Jiri thing? Neither does Jakub Nakladal or Cody Hodgson, though. So there goes that theory. These are guys who are worth taking a risk on at this point, honestly. If they’ll take short money or fewer years than they would have, say, a month ago, they’re worth gambling on. Give them something in the neighborhood of the Justin Schultz “$1.4 million for a year” contract and you probably don’t end up regretting that decision.
On the other hand, there are guys like Kris Russell who still don’t have jobs, and that’s maybe a sign NHL teams are getting smarter about how they deal with these things in general.
The thing with Hudler in particular baffles me. If they’re letting Jiri Hudler — whose 176 points ties him for 35th in scoring over the last three seasons — get a contract, maybe these teams aren’t all that smart. Yeah, he’ll be 33 in January, but Patrick Sharp has the same number of points in the last three seasons, and is a year older. If Sharp had been a UFA this summer, the list of teams trying to sign him on July 1 would be as long as your arm.
Someone’s likely to get a steal on any number of these low-profile free agents this late in the summer. And at this point, that might just be a training-camp invite. Pretty crazy.
4. Vermette to Anaheim
Speaking of signing free agents, I’d rather have Hudler than Vermette as a general rule. But nonetheless, the Ducks signed Vermette this week to a … two-year deal? That can’t be right. Vermette is still a reliable player who’s probably good for about half a point a game, which isn’t nothing, but haven’t we seen the wheels come off a bit in the past few years?
He’s not a particularly effective possession player and frankly never has been. Maybe that doesn’t matter much on a team coached by Randy Carlyle, and all he really does beyond that is win a lot of faceoffs, which is an overrated skill that has little correlation to possession (as seen over recent years for this player in particular).
The money isn’t bad or anything — $1.75 million AAV — but I really don’t see the attraction in this player over some of the others who were available.
Let’s put it this way: It seems the Coyotes chose Martin Hanzal and Brad Richardson over him, and the Ducks are a budget team that still hasn’t re-signed two players (Rickard Rakell and Hampus Lindholm) who are more important to their long-term success. And it’s not like the Ducks, who go with Getzlaf and Kesler up the middle before you even get to Rakell or Nate Thompson, are hurting for center depth.
Two years for a 34-year-old who scores only somewhat reliably and doesn’t drive possession seems like a bit much. It’s mid-August and there were better options available.
3. The Avs
On the one hand, losing a coach as bad as Patrick Roy has them well-positioned for a step forward. On the other, starting a coaching search in late August isn’t exactly a recipe for success when it comes to finding a better candidate.
Not that there’s a lot of precedent for a hire that late in the year, of course. The only current coach who was hired later in the offseason than whoever Joe Sakic can find is Dave Tippett, who came aboard with Arizona in late September, 2009. That’s because Wayne Gretzky stepped down on Sept. 24!
And hey, similar situations, too. All-time great player who would never actually get fired realizes “I don’t fit into the long-term plans here” and just takes his ball and goes home. At the time, the Coyotes sale was still a big deal, and neither of the potential ownership groups at the time like Gretzky as the coach (as well they shouldn’t have).
The problem for Colorado is that it’s not as though a good coach like Tippett is available to them. Tippett spent the whole summer on the market after being canned in Dallas for problems which were not his fault. No other coaches with solid NHL pedigree are really available at this point; Colorado will probably have to ask teams for permission to talk to AHL coaches, assistants, and so on to find a reasonable replacement. I bet other teams are thrilled with that prospect this late in the summer, because then they also have to go looking for new bodies.
But again, the Avalanche are going into the season with a coach who is not Patrick Roy, and the benefit there is massive.
2. Vrbata to Arizona
Arizona replaced Antoine Vermette with Radim Vrbata, and that seems like a pretty decent move to me. He’s signed for $1 million plus bonuses, and for next year only.
The player just turned 35, which is of course a worry, as is the fact that he dipped last season to 27 points in 63 games after scoring 32-32-63 in 79 as a 33-year-old. Can he regain his old form? Tough to say, but you don’t usually go from 32 goals (albeit playing with the Sedins) to scoring just 13. Doesn’t usually happen. So if he can find a bit of a middle ground there, that’s a contract that quickly becomes worth it.
And if it doesn’t work out, well, it’s one year and short money, and he probably won’t hit his bonuses anyway.
This is a smart gamble from a smart team. Very low-risk for a potentially middling reward.1
1. Jimmy Vesey
Yeah by the way, just on the subject of everyone’s favorite headline-grabber du jour, I’d much rather have Hudler or Tlusty than this guy, in theory.
Yeah he’s cost-controlled to some extent, and obviously you also control his free agency rights for his second contract two years from now. But a max contract for him carries a cap hit of $3.775 million if he hits all his bonuses. That’s a huge amount of money for a guy who you literally have no idea what he looks like at the NHL level. Does he hit all those bonuses? I’m not sure, obviously.
If you can only get Vesey locked in at the cost of, say, almost three Hudlers or Tlustys, I dunno if that’s really worth it. It’s nice to get assets that cost you literally nothing but money, and it’s great for Vesey that he’s the subject of such a bidding war between half a dozen or more teams.
But again, it certainly isn’t a bad thing to get Vesey. There just might be more effective and cheaper short-term options out there.
(Not ranked this week: The Nighthawks.
Do you think the new Las Vegas team — if “Las Vegas Nighthawks” is what they go with — is named after the Hopper painting or the Tom Waits album? Doesn’t matter, both would be good inspirations, I guess. However, I had the realization the other day that they might try to go with “Knighthawks” and split the difference between two not-great names. That would be really, really terrible.)
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
(All statistics via Corsica unless otherwise noted.)
