The free agency period officially got underway last weekend – so the Rink Crew gathered to talk about it.
We’re also excited to announce some additions to the Rink family – please welcome our two newest contributors, Kalilu and Andrew! Keep an eye out for more from them going forward.
Q1: What are your initial thoughts to the moves made by the Caps on Day 1 of free agency – the trade for Joel Edmundson and the free agent signing of Max Pacioretty?
Kalilu: I really don’t have any strong opinions on Edmundson as a player, especially given that Montreal’s retaining 50% on his deal. The logjam it creates on the blueline is what concerns me, with Martin Fehervary signing an extension and Alexander Alexeyev beginning the first season of his two-year contract, which is a one-way deal. It would seem like Alexeyev would be the odd-man out, which doesn’t help the team’s effort to not be the oldest roster in the league.
In a vacuum, buying low on an elite goal-scoring winger in Pacioretty is a win. In a perfect world, this would be the move for a top-six forward that MacLellan’s hinted at attempting since his exit interview. Unfortunately, this is a world where Pacioretty is recovering from back-to-back Achilles tears on the same leg, tempering all expectations. Saying you want to acquire a top-6 forward is much easier than actually acquiring one (most teams prefer not to give away guys like that for free), and given how little the Caps have to offer in trade discussions, it wouldn’t surprise me if Patches ends up being the biggest name at forward the team brings in this summer. In isolation, it’s an excellent gamble to make. Looking at the bigger picture, I don’t think anyone will feel at ease if this is the biggest addition to a forward group that only had one 20-goal scorer not named Alex Ovechkin in 2023.
Still, with cap space tight around the league, tough to argue against adding a player with Pacioretty’s track record at that low a price.
Andrew: I like a good bargain. When you’re a cap-strapped team, an aggressive move may just not be available. If Maximillian Pacioretty can stay in the lineup, I think his offensive game will be fine, and (assuming Evgeny Kuznetsov is still on the team), skating on the second line alongside Kuznetsov should give Pacioretty plenty of opportunities to score. There may be some extra motivation, too, to come back strong, earn another contract – with the Caps or elsewhere – and show that he can still play. I think it’s a good gamble that will be positive and possibly impactful on the season.
As far as the Joel Edmundson signing. I’m in the same place as Kalilu. No strong opinions. Edmundson probably is the defensive rock on the left side. Edmundson probably would have been a heavy-minute guy for last year’s coaching staff, so I’m curious to see what Spencer Carbery and Mitch Love will do with D pairings and ice time. I still expect Edmundson to be a regular lineup guy but perhaps the new coaches will be willing to give Alex Alexeyev a long leash and let him play – and I prefer this to having Matt Irwin be a regular. But it does look like Alexeyev is the odd one out.
Bryan: I’m all for bringing in guys who you believe can compete in a way that will force the folks already in house to have to work for their spots and have there be fewer guarantees about who earns a sweater on any given night. With Matt Irwin’s departure, there was always going to need to be another d-man to be brought in to push a guy like Alex Alexeyev (or say, Lucas Johansen) to be more than just a 7D. Given the age and composition of the defensive corps, it is a near inevitability that we’ll see guys slot in to the lineup who won’t be there on opening night at some point this year, so to have their options opened up with the Joel Edmundson acquisition sits just fine with me. I know that “value” is the name of the game these days given the constraints that Washington has to work with, but I don’t see any harm in making guys earn their spot.
As for the Pacioretty deal, it feels like a classic low-risk, high-reward proposition. While I’m not certain he can return be a high-sixties points producer (one achilles injury is a lot to overcome, let alone two) but if he can even look half as good as he did in his last full season of work (19-20 in Vegas where he tallied 32 goals and 34 assists in 71 games) then at the pricetag they got him for, they’ll be over the moon. The team did a nice job of hedging their bets with his deal, stacking it pretty heavily with games played bonus incentives, and they clearly feel confident that if he’s healthy enough to play, he’ll be healthy enough to produce.
A lot has been made of the logjam of older talent on the NHL roster that’s preventing some of the younger guys from taking the next step to being full-time contributors. These concerns still do ring true but if your Alexei Protas-es, Beck Malenstyns, and Connor McMichaels can’t definitively win a competition against the guys ahead of them on the depth chart despite the stated goal of giving them the opportunity to win those roles, then what does that really say about where they are in terms of being able to meaningfully contribute to a team that is still ostensibly trying to win and not fully rebuild?
JP: Echoing what others have said on Edmunson, I don’t love what it means for Alexeyev, who is probably already the better of the two and certainly has more upside (and I’d note that Alexeyev’s deployment and usage completely borked the offensive side of his game in his rookie season last year):
Hell, Alexeyev is probably the better defensive player of the two:
But depth and veteran leadership blah blah blah.
On Pacioretty, I like the gamble, but my expectations are low. Fun fact: over the last three seasons, only 11 players have scored goals at a higher per-game rate than Pacioretty (0.5). Not fun fact: over the last three seasons, Pacioretty has only played 92 games. So we’ll see. Easy guy to root for, though, and you’ve gotta take some swings at this point, so thumbs up from me.
Rob: I’m good with both moves. Of course there are a lot of open questions about how HCSC will handle personnel, including where he comes down on the age-old veteran/prospect approach to giving out ice time. In general, among a lot of consternation about prospect usage the last few years, I’ve been comfortable letting younger players earn their ice time. So if anyone on the team can’t play well enough to keep Edmundson on the bench (or the coach can’t see it) then the problem isn’t the signing. This is also a blue line that has seen a lot of injuries over the last year so it seems likely that anyone that can stay healthy will get a fair look.
Patchy is a slam dunk win, even with tempered expectations. They’ve needed a shoot-first lefty for the PP for a while now, he gives them a lot more flexibility in the top six, and if all else fails you move him for literally nothing—worked out for the last team to do it.
Becca: Both of these moves felt like low-risk, potentially low-to-high return moves to me. I agree with a lot of the above, that with the trade for Edmundson, Alexeyev is likely – for now – the odd-man out on the blueline…but he’s still pretty young for a defenseman, as are Martin Fehervary and Rasmus Sandin. Having more of a veteran presence on the back end is not necessarily a bad thing, and if Alexeyev proves to be what we think he is (i.e. a better player than the guy coming in), he can prove that in camp and have Edmundson take up the 7th defenseman spot.
As for Patches…I’m not even going to pretend to be unbiased and even-keeled about this one. I’m over-the-moon excited, and I’m remaining optimistic that the two surgeries and long time off will have Pacioretty back to full strength very soon.
Q2: What is one deal made so far by another team – since July 1 – that you would have wanted the Caps to make (or are there any)?
Kalilu: While we’re on the subject of talented scoring wingers coming off recent Achilles tears, Anthony Duclair is someone I’ve wanted on this team for a couple of years now and fills a lot of what I think the lineup’s been missing since losing Andre Burakovsky and Jakub Vrana. He likely would’ve been a safer bet than Pacioretty tool, although I’m assuming we would have wanted Florida to retain a portion of Duke’s $3 million cap hit. San Jose has no such qualms about cap room at this stage in their rebuild, leading to Duclair now residing in the Bay Area. Oh well.
Andrew: Am I allowed to say Dmitry Orlov? [Ed. Note: Yes, you are!] Not at the cost of course, but just to have him back and to not be in Carolina… Bleh. Otherwise, I don’t have a move I wish the Caps would have made. All I can think of is former players signing in the division. I’d would pick those players to not be on rival teams *scowls at Lars Eller* But maybe that means the Caps will get more power-plays with the Tiger on the once against them.
JP: Dallas signing Matt Duchene for $3M had me a little jealous, and Blake Wheeler for $800K seems like a nice play for the Rangers. Either of those could’ve helped the Caps.
Bryan: Duchene and Wheeler are great calls – those both would have been fantastic targets if they could have made it work. The one I’m going to be focused on this year as a “what could have been” was Edmonton snatching up Connor Brown for just $775k (with the potential of getting up to $3 mil and change with bonuses.) It feels like the Pacioretty acquisition was a direct reaction to Brown’s departure, so there’s going to be some A-B comparisons to track as the year goes on. Brown’s history with Connor McDavid as linemates for Erie in the OHL was certainly a draw to get the band back together for Brown, but I can’t help but wonder if Washington could have or should have done more to entice him to stay.
Think back a year ago when it looked like Tom Wilson was going to be on the shelf for the majority, if not all, of the 2022-23 season – Brown was positioned as a player who brought a similar set of skills and a similar playing style that would have granted the Caps a reasonable facsimile while Wilson recovered from his injury. Obviously that didn’t go according to plan as he suffered a season-ending knee injury after just four games in D.C., so the coulda-shoulda-wouldas are going to hang over this one to be sure. The one piece of solace I have is if Washington could have gotten him for a similar deal to what he took in Edmonton but they decided for some reason that there was enough cause for concern to not make that offer, then perhaps they know something that we don’t about how he progressed from his injury that led them to believe that Pacioretty was the better choice despite injury concerns of his own.
Becca: Lars Eller. For reasons.
But no in all seriousness, I would have been fine with the Duchene deal. Other than that…meh. I think the Caps will be better served updating the roster via trade – certainly will have younger players available that way – and while there weren’t too many crazy deals this year, there also weren’t a ton that I looked at and thought “man, I wish the Caps had done [x]”.