TSN reports that goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury has signed a seven-year, $35-million extension with Pittsburgh.

One sign that free agency might be dying down? On its website, TSN has moved on to promoting this week’s CFL games! Go Roughriders!

Here’s the first set of answers. Thanks for all the great questions. Hopefully I can do a good job of answering them. Keep them coming, if you’d like, on the original post…
Continue reading “Forum answers I” »

Once again, it’s quiet around the league this morning, with Washington’s two-year signing of Keith Aucoin being the only real news. Seems as though half of the league is on Mats Sundin Watch ’08, waiting for the dominoes to fall after that.

Not the Kings though. We’ll see what happens today. I’ll be surprised if there’s not some Rob Blake resolution, one way or the other, but obviously there’s no guarantee of that. And we’ll keep an eye on which second- (and possibly third-) tier defensemen start signing.

Keep the questions coming in the “open forum” post. Plenty of good ones already. I’ll start answering soon…

I get the feeling there might be one or two Kings-related questions out there this week…

Go ahead and fire away and I’ll do my best to answer/clarify any questions that are out there. It’s much easier than trying to go back through the posts and answer questions.

Fire away!

Seems as though another day has come and gone without any movement from the Kings. Perhaps I shouldn’t say “another day.” After all, yesterday brought the magical trade for Denis Gauthier…

It’s not too hard to figure out what happened today. The Kings made a play for Brooks Orpik and it didn’t work out. Now the attention, most likely, turns to another tier of defensemen and the Kings will look to grab a guy on a short-term contract, either via trade or signing.

The more interesting thing is that Rob Blake remains unsigned. I did not anticipate that, and perhaps if his agent would return calls I might get a little insight. But when there’s mutual interest people a player and team and there’s no deal, you have to follow the money, right?

Obviously, I’ll stay on top of all this…

We’ve been hearing a lot about the Kings’ plans to “go young” next season, but what does it really mean? Here’s an educated guess at what the Kings’ roster might look like if they didn’t acquire any more players, based on age at the start of next season:

One player under 20: Drew Doughty (18).

Nine players under 25: Jack Johnson (21), Anze Kopitar (21), Alec Martinez (21), Brian Boyle (23), Dustin Brown (23), Patrick O’Sullivan (23), Teddy Purcell (23), Brad Richardson (23), Doughty.

20 players under 30: Matt Greene (25), Peter Harrold (25), Matt Moulson (25), Erik Ersberg (26), Alexander Frolov (26), Jarret Stoll (26), Matt Ellis (27), Jason LaBarbera (28), Kyle Calder (29), Raitis Ivanans (29), Tom Preissing (29), Doughty, Johnson, Kopitar, Martinez, Boyle, Brown, O’Sullivan, Purcell, Richardson.

Players over 30: Michal Handzus (31), Denis Gauthier (32), Derek Armstrong (35).

Remember also that even though we’ve been talking about free-agent defensemen here, Lombardi also raised the possibility last night of trading for a left-shot defenseman who would be able to fill a role for one season. So that opens the situation up tremendously. Here’s what Lombardi said last night on this subject:

“The other thing that showed up, before free agency and even today, as people spend money to get guys in, there might be a `soft’ deal there, so to speak. Maybe we could trade a `B-level’ prospect or a mid-round or late-round pick for a guy who can be here for a year.”

The Islanders have signed forward Doug Weight to a contract, years and money not announced.

Lombardi indicated that his backup plan for a defenseman might be to sign a “bridge” player with a left shot. Well, there’s only so many out there, so I decided to go through the free-agent list and find some available left-shot defensemen. Here they are, listed by last season’s salary, with age in parenthesis. Let me know if I missed anyone…

Paul Mara (27), $3,000,000
Marek Malik (32), $2,500,000
Bret Hedican (36), $2,432,000
Dmitri Kalinin (26), $2,250,000
Keith Carney (37), $2,100,000
Dick Tarnstrom (32), $2,000,000 (signed in Sweden)
Jaroslav Modry (36), $1,200,000
Petteri Nummelin (34), $1,200,000 (signed in Switzerland)
Branislav Mezei (26), $850,000
Steve McCarthy (26), $725,000

TSN is reporting that Brooks Orpik has agreed to a six-year, $22.5-million contract to stay with Pittsburgh. The contract averages 3.75 million per year.

And…that was the Kings’ target. More than likely, this re-opens the door for Rob Blake and a “bridge” type defenseman.