The Detroit Red Wings were left out in the cold by UFA defensemen during the free agent frenzy and as general manager Ken Holland’s comments would indicate, not to mention the exorbitant contract the club handed out to Kyle Quincey, the team is still desperate to add a right-handed shooting defender.

According to reports, they’re still “in” on attempting to trade for Buffalo’s Tyler Myers. If they pull it off, it will surely cost them a pound of flesh in the form of quality forward depth and high draft picks…

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20 NHL players filed for player elected arbitration this weekend, including Derick Brassard, P.K. Subban, James Reimer and others. Most of these players won’t actually have hearings, but this device does provide RFA players with a bit of additional leverage. 

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The Canucks signed defender Chris Tanev to a severely discounted one-year, $2 million contract, ahead of the filing deadline for arbitration. Tanev is a fancy stats darling and an ace penatly-killer, who often played top-pairing minutes for the Canucks last season.

At $2 million, he’s excellent value, though whittling him down to that low price tag may come with a cost down the road. Jason Botchford’s latest would suggest that Tanev’s camp isn’t particularly pleased about the fact that the team has never offered the reliable hybrid shutdown defender a multi-year contract.

Botchford’s article suggests Jared Cowen and Karl Alzner as comparables for Tanev, but I think those are poor comps for a player with Tanev’s skillset and history. Alzner and Cowen are both big, physical defenders that were selected in the first round. Tanev is slight and injury prone and was undrafted. I’ve always thought the better comparables for him are guys like Jared Spurgeon (who is on a three-year deal worth a bit more than $2.5 per) and Marco Scandella (who is on a two-year deal worth just over $1 per).

Anyway, Tanev is clearly a top-four defender for the Canucks next season (it would be interesting to see him play more often with Alex Edler than he has in the past), and at $2 million – that’s excellent value. If he proves himself the club would be wise to sign him to a long-term deal, provided that Tanev’s camp is willing, that buys out several of his UFA years. 

There’s some puck moving defenders in the Western Conference who have signed that type of deal in recent years, guys like Cam Fowler, Roman Josi and Slava Voynov. The RFA years for those players are valued between $3.4375 million (Josi) and $3.75 million (Fowler), which speaks to precisely how steep the discount on Tanev’s new one-year deal is.

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Also from that Botchford piece linked above, there are reportedly three teams interested in trading for goaltender Jacob Markstrom, who Vancouver is attempting to trade in the wake of the Ryan Miller signing.

Once seen as the “next great NHL goaltender,” Markstrom has struggled mighitily at the NHL level in recent years despite consistent success at the AHL level. In fact, you could reasonably argue that he’s been the worst regular NHL goaltender over the past three years…

Markstrom is due $1.4 million in actual salary this year, on a contract that carries a $1.2 million cap-hit. So if he’s buried in the minors – and he’d have to clear waivers first – his contract will still count against the salary cap. If there’s really three teams interested in acquiring his rights though, that would suggest that he wouldn’t make it through waivers anyway, which I find mildly surprising.

There just aren’t a lot of backup jobs available, and a $1.2 million backup doesn’t seem like a particularly efficient use of cap-space.

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The Buffalo Sabres re-signed Matt Hackett to a one-year contract. The Sabres dressed an NHL record nine goaltenders last season, six of whom actually saw action. It’s the most goaltenders a club has used in a single season since that weird year where the Kings used seven goaltenders (including Jonathan Bernier on an emergency CHL call up), back when Jason Labarbera was their most frequent starter…

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On the Sabres and “busy net” situations: I was asked to complete a study on NHL goaltender contracts a while back. I won’t share the results in full here, but essentially I looked at all netminders who signed their initial NHL contracts (ELCs and FA deals inclusive) between the ’04-05 NHL lockout and the 2013 NHL lockout. It’s interesting to note, perhaps, that during that time frame nearly half of the goaltenders who inked their initial NHL deals played in at least one NHL game.

Also interesting to note, in relation to “busy net” situations, 12 NHL goaltenders signed their initial NHL contracts between the two lockouts and appeared in an NHL game during the life of that first deal, and then never signed a subsequent NHL contract. What do all 12 of those goaltenders have in common? They debuted during a season in which their team used at least four different puck-stoppers. 

The Sabres recently declined to extend Connor Knapp, one of the six Sabres goalies who appeared in a game a year ago, a qualifying offer. If he doesn’t receive an NHL contract this summer, which seems very likely, he’d be the 13th goaltender to meet this standard in the salary cap era…

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Finally, Lightning forward Jonathan Drouin is a joy to watch and I hope we get to see a lot more of that in the NHL next season.