The pieces are moving every which way in the world of the National Hockey League. After a hectic free agency period, it appears that things have quieted down. Before the 2014-15 Stanley Cup futures are posted, let’s take a look at the winners and losers of free agency:
Winners: Dallas Stars and Tampa Bay Lightning
In Dallas, the mood surrounding the Stars has brightened considerably after the organization was able to bring aboard Jason Spezza. Just about everyone around the league thinks that Dallas has made a significant upgrade and is in position to field an extremely powerful offense next season. Spezza just turned 31 and therefore has a lot of miles left in his legs. He’s not an overpriced brand-name player who is at or near the very end of the line. His career can become a very durable one. The Stars are getting him at a point where he could be a mainstay of the team for many years, perhaps until the end of this decade in 2020. If Spezza is able to be everything that Dallas hopes he can be, the Stars will have hit a home run.
The other team that really gained a lot of leverage relative to other teams in the NHL was the Lightning. Tampa Bay got two players from the New York Rangers, fresh off the Blueshirts’ march to the Stanley Cup Final against the Los Angeles Kings. The Lightning made away with Anton Stralman and Brian Boyle, two hard-working players who should get a lot of respect and carry a lot of influence in the locker room. The Lightning have made themselves more skilled, but also tougher and more disciplined. It’s hard to argue with that kind of a set of deals.
Losers: Ottawa Senators and New York Rangers
The very simple read on the losers in the NHL free agency round is that they lost the players the two teams above managed to pluck away from them. Ottawa was drained by the Dallas Stars, and the Rangers were gutted as a product of Tampa Bay’s moves in the boardroom. However, that’s not the whole story.
The Senators and Rangers play in hockey-mad markets, places where NHL players should love to play. The issue at hand for Ottawa and New York is that players shouldn’t be wanting to get out of there for a little more money elsewhere. This is especially so in the case of the Rangers, who just made the Cup finals and should be seen as a destination franchise in the NHL. New York has one of the top three goaltenders in the league in Henrik Lundqvist, and it has one of the more proven and established head coaches in the league in the form of Alain Vigneault, who coached the Vancouver Canucks within one game of the Stanley Cup title in the 2011 season. Why did New York lose the players it did to Tampa Bay, while also conceding the loss of Benoit Pouliot to the Edmonton Oilers? These are head-scratching developments New York will have to try to deal with, but the outlook isn’t as good for the Eastern Conference champions at this point.
