2024 NHL FREE AGENCY WINNERS AND LOSERS: NASHVILLE PREDATORS SMASH THE COMPETITION
Wow. That was a day to remember. On paper, 2024 NHL unrestricted free agency offered potential for drama given the number of high-profile names going to market. But did anyone expect almost all of it to play out within the first few hours of free agency?
After an unprecedented bonanza of activity, more than 50 of the top 75 names on Frank Seravalli’s DFO Free Agent board have disappeared, including each of the top 20. Given how much of the process has played out already, it’s not too early to declare winners and losers of the day, is it?
Let explore which teams impressed, surprised, disappointed and frightened us with their decisions on July 1. I present my 2024 Free Agency Winners and Losers.
But first, a couple disclaimers: (a) I’m assessing specifically how teams fared in free agency. So while Utah Hockey Club, for instance improved a lot this week, they did so via trades and thus don’t qualify as a free agency winner; and (b) If a team appears nowhere on my list, it means I believe they fared just fine, not well enough to earn winner status but not poorly enough to be losers. The Florida Panthers would be one example, having done great to lock up Sam Reinhart but also having lost several components of their championship squad, with the net result landing them in the middle. Same goes for the New York Rangers, who were quiet by contender standards but made one nice addition by trading for Reilly Smith.
THE WINNERS
Chicago Blackhawks
The Blackhawks and GM Kyle Davidson had to walk a tightrope to achieve their goal this offseason. They wanted to build a more competitive team around their generational talent, Connor Bedard, in hopes of challenging for the playoffs in the next year or two while he’s still on his entry-level deal, just as the Pittsburgh Penguins and Edmonton Oilers did with Sidney Crosby and Connor McDavid when they were sophomores. Yet they also didn’t want to reach and saddle themselves with term while still years away from true Stanley Cup contention.
Davidson executed the plan perfectly on Monday. Teuvo Teravainen will help the power play and bring legit top-six-caliber scoring touch. Same goes for Tyler Bertuzzi, who will blend scoring with a pest presence. Both of them represent potential first-line options to play with Bedard. Meanwhile, Chicago added veterans Craig Smith and Pat Maroon to fill out the forward group and Alec Martinez for the D-corps, all on one-year deals that will be flippable as trade deadline rentals next winter. Perhaps best of all, the Hawks landed one of the best value options in net in Laurent Brossoit, who comes in at a $3.3 million cap hit for two seasons. Aside from Bertuzzi, who got four years, every other signing was for between one and three years. The Hawks look a lot more like a real NHL club going forward yet aren’t hamstrung financially, and they still have more than $7 million in cap space. Bravo.
Nashville Predators
You smashed it, Nashville. Wow. Ever since Barry Trotz took over as GM, he’s set out working hard to change the team culture. He was busy last summer, bringing in Ryan O’Reilly, Gustav Nyquist and Luke Schenn, and topped himself this year. Steven Stamkos, Jonathan Marchessault and Brady Skjei? Whoa. Talk about a splash. On one hand, Stamkos is 34, Marchessault 33, Skjei 30, and the contracts they signed today will pay them through age 38, 38 and 37, respectively. On the other: Nashville was shockingly competitive last year and has three all-world players in defenseman Roman Josi, left winger Filip Forsberg and freshly re-signed goaltender Juuse Saros who are worth building around. Kudos to Trotz for seriously shooting his shot – while further establishing Yaroslav Askarov as a trade chip by signing Scott Wedgewood to back up Saros. As a cherry on top, Nashville retained a solid two-way blueliner in Alexandre Carrier on three-year deal. Just Ws all day long in Music City.
New Jersey Devils
Everything Devils GM Tom Fitzgerald has done this offseason so far suggests he knows what most of us know: 2023-24 was a fluke and the Devils remain a real Stanley Cup threat despite missing the playoffs this past season. By insulating their D-corps with heavy Brenden Dillon and shutdown blueliner Brett Pesce, who becomes literally a rich man’s John Marino, Fitzgerald sets his team up to avoid a repeat of last year. No longer will an injury to Dougie Hamilton cripple the D-corps and force youngsters Luke Hughes and Simon Nemec to play higher in the lineup than they’re ready to. The Devils are deep on the blueline now, and with the Jacob Markstrom acquisition last week to boot, it’ll be far tougher to score on them even if you get past the suped-up D-corps. Adding versatile middle-six forward Stefan Noesen was a sneaky-good move, too.
Toronto Maple Leafs
It might have been nice to see the Leafs add another scorer up front, but they’ve indicated they still might, and this was the NHL’s No. 2 offensive team in the regular season anyway. Toronto has the personnel to remain elite in that regard even with Tyler Bertuzzi gone. What mattered more was shoring up the defense and goaltending. If you could design one player in a laboratory with the exact skill makeup Toronto needs most, it’s Chris Tanev. It has been Tanev for years, really. He is a pure shutdown artist, a leader, a righthanded shot, experienced battling other teams’ best players, and he has already weathered two Canadian markets in his career. He’s an underrated puck-mover, too. It took a six-year commitment to get him, but the Leafs really only need him to be their horse for two or three years. If the contract takes on water later, there’s always Robidas Island.
Meanwhile, Oliver Ekman-Larsson has only ever been a “bad” player relative to his contract. As he showed this past season on Florida, he’s a perfectly useful player when he’s not making more than $8 million. At $3.5 million, he’ll provide depth and another option on the power play, where the Leafs struggle in the postseason. Jani Hakanpaa will fill the big punisher void left by Ilya Lyubushkin and Joel Edmundson. The best goalie in the NHL on a per-60 basis this past season, leading the league in goals saved above average at 5-on-5: Anthony Stolarz. He’s now signed to be Joseph Woll’s 1B partner. It still looks like the forward corps could use a jolt in the form of a Mitch Marner trade, but we’re grading free agency day performance here, not grading trades that may or may not happen.
BIG MOVES, BUT ARE THEY BETTER OFF?
Tampa Bay Lightning
Tampa made a true Monkey’s Paw deal transaction. Before free agency day, they moved Mikhail Sergachev’s and Tanner Jeannot’s contracts in Day-2 trades at the draft. On Monday, they got bigtime UFA prize Jake Guentzel for seven years at $9 million per…but it came at the expense of legend Steven Stamkos. The dream of being a lifelong Bolt is over, and the two-time Stanley Cup champion captain was clearly disappointed by the process. So, GM Julien BriseBois, you have a high-end scoring winger added to the fray in Guentzel. He’s five years younger than Stamkos and thus a bit better for a bit longer, but has this team improved enough in the process for that bad juju to be worth it? Even with Stamkos out and Guentzel in, the Bolts are NHL’s eighth-oldest team on paper. Maybe they’ve propped their window open longer, especially if prospect acquisition Conor Geekie becomes something, but they may have also doomed themselves to more years of mediocrity rather than true championship contention.
Washington Capitals
Okay, so the Caps have been busy. When they traded for Pierre-Luc Dubois and Andrew Mangiapane last week, it felt like GM Brian MacLellan was trying to increase the Caps’ offensive output to help Alex Ovechkin pursue the goals record, nothing more. Then came the Logan Thompson trade on Saturday. Then, when free agency hit, pow, the Caps signed excellent shutdown defenseman Matt Roy and traded for Jakob Chychrun. It’s quite obvious the Capitals are a vastly improved team, but will that improvement simply rewind them from a Wildcard team to, say, the third or fourth best team in the Metro? It doesn’t feel like all the activity pushes Washington closer to a Stanley Cup. That’s why I can’t call them a ‘Winner’ despite the fact MacLellan had such a productive day.
LOSERS
Buffalo Sabres
If you buy out your third-leading goal scorer, it better be part of a multi-step plan that makes you better. The Sabres cast aside Jeff Skinner a couple days ago and will now pay him $2,444,445 not to play them for the next six years. The Sabres, who already were swimming in cap space, didn’t exactly embark on a spending spree Monday. They added forwards Jason Zucker, Sam Lafferty, and Nicolas Aube-Kubel up front. Those three players scored 34 goals combined last season. Skinner alone had 24. Buffalo signed Jacob Bryson and Dennis Gilbert for their D-corps, too. All but the Lafferty deal were for one year. These are the moves a rebuilding or even a tanking team makes – not a team that fired its head coach and is supposedly desperate to end an NHL-record playoff drought at 13 years. Where’s the aggression from GM Kevyn Adams?
Colorado Avalanche
Bringing back Jonathan Drouin for another year was a win, but the Avs sure are stuck right now. They only have nine forwards signed for this coming season – 11 if you count Gabriel Landeskog as a healthy body and assume Valeri Nichushkin will be reinstated from his drug suspension by the fall. With Sean Walker leaving as a UFA, Colorado has five blueliners signed for next season. According to Seravalli, this team has $300,000 in cap space. So, yeah, it’s ugly, and it will take a lot of creativity to improve, or even maintain status quo for, this top-heavy team going forward.
Detroit Red Wings
Similar to the Skinner buyout logic: If you’re going to ship out one of your top four blueliners in Jake Walman, plus a second-round pick, for nothing, it better be because you have grand plans. As Day 1 of free agency wraps up, Wings GM Steve Yzerman has retained Patrick Kane, but Cam Talbot, Erik Gustafsson, Christian Fischer, William Lagesson and Jack Campbell stand as the biggest additions to a team that missed the playoffs for an eighth consecutive season last year. How much longer can Yzerman dine out on his legendary status before the fans command more? Detroit’s offseason is simply nowhere near good enough unless a major trade is coming.
Los Angeles Kings
The Kings haven’t advanced past Round 1 of the playoffs since Rob Blake became their GM in 2017. While moving off the Pierre-Luc Dubois contract was wise long-term, it still removed some offense, even it was underachieving offense, from L.A.’s top nine. Then Viktor Arvidsson departed as a UFA Monday, as did goaltender Talbot, who had much better numbers than newly acquired Darcy Kuemper this past season. Oh, and the Kings lost excellent shutdown defenseman Roy to free agency, too. Keeping score? The Kings have absolutely gotten their clocks cleaned this summer. Their biggest “win” was simply correcting a brutal mistake that cost them some key player and draft capital a year ago to boot. Handing out multi-year deals at AAVs north of $3 million for checking forward Warren Foegele and depth blueliner Joel Edmundson does not move the needle. The Kings’ Monday was pretty much the antithesis of the Preds’ nonstop party.
Pittsburgh Penguins
It’s not that Pittsburgh did nothing on Monday. They signed blueliner Matt Grzelcyk and right winger Anthony Beauvillier, for instance. But they also traded right winger Reilly Smith to the New York Rangers. Mark down July 1, 2024 as the day I looked at the Penguins roster and said, “It’s so over.” I’ve been advocating for a teardown for at least five years, but that was at least when the Penguins were competing for playoff spots. I look at what’s left now for Sidney Crosby, and it feels like his contract extension will come from the goodness of his heart and loyalty to the city rather than a desire to win. The two-year playoff drought will stretch to three unless GM Kyle Dubas pulls off a miraculous move in the coming weeks. The Kevin Hayes trade was not it.
Seattle Kraken
Oh, how that 2022-23 playoff run screwed up the franchise’s trajectory. In two of their three seasons, the Kraken have not been a threat. A three-year-old franchise shouldn’t always want to be one, not when it needs to keep building up its pipeline of prospects. The Kraken handed two of the biggest, chunkiest contracts of any team July 1, and neither makes a ton of sense for them. Brandon Montour is already 30, broke out in his age 29 season, had shoulder surgery last summer and will now earn $7.14 million until he’s 37. Chandler Stephenson is now Seattle’s highest-paid forward at $6.25 million for the next seven years. He’s already 30 and his career highs in goals and points are 21 and 65, respectively. He’s a fast, versatile and coachable forward, but that is quite an overpay. The Kraken clearly wanted to add some talent and Stanley Cup pedigree, but the term, not so much the money, to bring these two to the Pacific Northwest could be crippling in a few years.
Winnipeg Jets
The Jets did well to retain blueliner Dylan DeMelo, even if it was for slightly above market value. But the rest of the math ain’t mathing. A team that lost in Round 1 of the playoffs has said goodbye to forwards Tyler Toffoli and Sean Monahan and defenseman Dillon. Brossoit was arguably the best backup in the league in 2023-24, and he left for Chicago, replaced by the inferior Eric Comrie and Kaapo Kahkonen. It sure feels like the Jets are poised to take a step back in the Central based on their quiet summer so far, and the Rutger McGroarty impasse is a kick in the pants, too.
WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS…
Vegas Golden Knights
I had to give Vegas its own category because I simply don’t believe this is it for the Evil Empire. Bye bye Marchessault, Thompson, Stephenson, Martinez, Anthony Mantha and more…with no one coming in aside from new backup goalie Ilya Samsonov and depth checking forward Zach-Aston Reese? The Golden Knights are clear losers on paper so far, but this franchise never sits on its hands. Particularly if Vegas let Marchessault walk for $5.5 million, GM Kelly McCrimmon must have a trick up his sleeve. Right?
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