With just one playoff game during the last week, there has been lots of time to get antsy for the draft and the opening of free agency.
Teams are starting to set the table. We've seen a few players signed to contract extensions — but nothing extravagant, yet. And we've seen Vegas make its first move to clear cap space, a couple of days after reeling in Bruce Cassidy as its next head coach.
At last, Evgenii Dadonov gets a new home — shipped to the Montreal Canadiens in exchange for the contract of Shea Weber.
Weber turns 37 this summer, and his deal has four years remaining at a cap hit of just over $7.5 million per season. So I guess we can now know with relative certainty that we won't see him on the ice again — the ride to the Final with Montreal last year was his swan song.
Weber was named winner of the Mark Messier Leadership Award in 2016, but that was his only major NHL trophy. He never won the Norris but was a finalist three times.
In 2011, he finished second to Nick Lidstrom by a tiny nine-point margin of 736 to 727. The following season, Erik Karlsson beat him out by 12 points: 1,069 to 1,057. And in 2014 he finished third with 633 voting points, well behind winner Duncan Keith (1,033) and second-place Zdeno Chara (667).
The Dallas Stars also made a cap-clearing move this week, sending the final year of Ben Bishop's contract to Buffalo, along with a seventh-round draft pick, in exchange for future considerations.
The Sabres are happy to take the final year of Bishop's contract, with its cap hit of just under $5 million, in order to reach next season's salary cap floor — which has risen by $800,000, to $61 million, according to the league's announcement on Thursday.
That announcement also made official the $1 million rise in next season's cap ceiling, to $82.5 million.
Bishop's contract has a benefit for Buffalo, which sits $14 million below the cap floor. But with so many teams already bumping up against the ceiling or in other forms of cap trouble, I'm a little surprised that Kevyn Adams didn't "weaponize" his cap space a little more aggressively, as they say. It's a valuable asset that should be worth more than a seventh-round pick for $5 million worth of room.
If he's willing to sell off space at those kind of bargain-basement prices, I wonder how open he'd be to help out the Canucks? The Sabres currently have 15 players signed for next season, according to
CapFriendly, and their only significant RFA in need of a new contract is Victor Olofsson. They've also got 11 picks in this year's draft, including three first-rounders.
The Sabres may still be interested in staying near the bottom and taking a crack at Connor Bedard in the 2023 draft. But they have no goalies signed for next year — except Bishop, who announced last winter that he wouldn't be able to play again.
But Buffalo was a pretty decent team during the back half of last season. I wonder if the Sabres would be interested in, say, Conor Garland and Mikey DiPietro in exchange for one of those draft picks? Garland would be a useful roster player, and DiPietro could help them build up their goaltending depth. Word is that he was passed by Arturs Silovs on the Canucks' organizational depth chart last season, and that the thinking is that Abbotsford will be looking to pair Silovs with another AHL-experienced veteran next year. I'm thinking they're hoping to find another diamond in the rough like Spencer Martin?
As far as the Stanley Cup Final goes, I may not have been as stoked about Game 1 as a lot of people, since the Avalanche were not rusty at all and the Lightning are in a hole again.
I still think there's hope for Tampa Bay. This is the third time in these playoffs alone that they've dropped Game 1; they do seem to have the ability to make effective adjustments once they get a read on their opponents. And despite not playing their best last Wednesday, they still got to overtime. If not for that unfortunate puck-over-glass penalty to Pat Maroon in the dying stages of the third period, they might have pulled it out.
It is high-level hockey though, isn't it?? A reminder of what the Canucks need to be striving to build.
Game 2, of course, goes Saturday at 5 p.m. PT. If you're looking for some on-ice action before that — and have a TSN package that includes its streaming options — you can check out the new 3Ice 3-on-3 league, which makes its debut in Vegas at 3 p.m. PT on Saturday.
Canucks' P.A. announcer Al Murdoch will be behind the mic in the arena for this new event — a fast-paced format that's a bit like a hockey version of Rugby Sevens.
The six teams in the league are headed up by a Who's Who of NHL legends: Guy Carbonneau, Grant Fuhr, John LeClair, Joe Mullen, Larry Murphy and Bryan Trottier.
Each game is made up of two eight-minute halves with a running clock. And each tour stop over the nine-week schedule will consist of six matches: three round-robin games, then two semi-finals and a final.
A few rules have been tweaked to keep the pace of the game as high as possible. I like the idea of goalies being able to play the puck anywhere on the ice. A good puck-moving stopper could be a real asset in the 3-on-3 format: let's see if Jeremy Brodeur (Team Carbonneau) is anywhere near as good as his farther Martin on that front.
Looking deeper at the rosters, there are a couple of one-time Canucks in the mix: Jayce Hawryluk is skating with Team LeClair, while Griffen Molino is on Team Murphy.
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