With the signing of Nathan Gerbe to go with Aaron Palushaj, the Canes have added 2 decent depth players to compete for a bevy of open roster spots in the bottom 6 of the Canes lineup. You can see why borderline AHL/NHL players who cannot get a 1-way NHL deal would flock to Raleigh. The team received virtually no contribution from the bottom 2 lines in 2012-13. It jettisoned most of the vets from last year’s bottom six in Jussi Jokinen, Tim Brent and Chad Larose. And except maybe Elias Lindholm none of the youth competing for the open spots are shoe-ins after mostly failing to seize the opportunity last season.
Related to this topic, did the free agent market run past Jim Rutherford this summer?
I think so.
Jim Rutherford was on record shortly after the season making improving the defense by adding a top 4 defenseman his top off-season priority. We can debate whether the addition of Andrej Sekera to the top 4 combined with Mike Komisarek for depth to go with the subtraction of Jamie McBain and Joe Corvo is enough, but I think Rutherford mostly did what he wanted with this top goal. The addition of Anton Khudobin also feels like a heady move to improve defensively in whatever number of games the backup plays. We will not know for sure if it will work out until we get into the season, but I think an honest self-assessment of Rutherford’s work would suggest that he was happy with where he is with regard to retooling the blue line.
But there is this issue of filling out 12 roster spots at forward. 2012-13 saw the top line of Jiri Tlusty/Eric Staal/Alexander Semin play lights out. There is some line combination sorting and chemistry figuring out to do, but behind the top line is a veteran mix of Jordan Staal, Tuomo Ruutu and Jeff Skinner. I voted against a Skinner/JStaal pairing before last season and have already registered a similar vote again for 2013-14. But regardless , especially with Ruutu healthy to start the season, there are some good players to help fill out most, if not all, of a second line and start work on the third line. But that is where things get dicey. The Canes got nothing from their 3rd and 4th lines in 2012-13, and it played a significant role in how the season ended up.
If you book the top paid/experienced players into the top 6 (Tlusty/EStaal/Semin, Skinner/JStaal/Ruutu), that leaves only Patrick Dwyer as a veteran bottom 6 forward and Kevin Westgarth as a special situation #13 leaving 5 spots wide open to be battled for at camp. I like the idea of having an open spot or 2 for a truly open competition at camp and to keep mixing young players into the core lineup. With the lack of a bunch of top-end prospects and no real clear winners from the 2012-13 regular season auditions, was it really Jim Rutherford’s plan to leave the bottom 6 that open? Does Rutherford really think that taking a 3rd/4th line liability from 2012-12 and parachuting in 4-5 youth players is a recipe for significant improvement?
I think not. Instead, I think the free agent market ran right past Jim Rutherford. With a limited budget to fill a decent number of spots, I think he expected to use the same game plan that has worked well for him in the past which was to wait out the first and even second wave of signings and then astutely sort through the leftovers to find quality players with good value on the cheap. But possibly driven by the 2-day “talking window” before opening of the free agent window, two things foiled what I think was probably Rutherford’s plan. First, the market moved incredibly quickly. A ton of signings teed up by the “talking period” compressed what is usually a couple days of phone tag into a few hours on the 1st day of free agency. It also helped teams figured out very quickly what they had and did not have, what their remaining budget and needs were, etc. which caused the 2nd wave of signings to almost come in on top of the 1st. The second thing that happened was that as luck would have it, the slim leftovers really were not the kind of players that Rutherford needed. Whereas the Canes needed size and grit and more penalty kill than power play, the small volume of leftovers mostly leaned offense and skill in players like Grabovski, Raymond, Jagr, etc. The type of 4th-line quality role players (i.e. Boyd Gordon, Maxim Lapierre, etc.) that often last weeks were gobbled up quickly. At the point where Rutherford saw the dust settle on the early moves and would normally have moved in there was only a collection of 8-10 players left most of whom did not fit what he needed.
I think there is a reasonable chance that the Canes will ultimately sign Brenden Morrow if the price is reasonable simply because he is the best, if not only, player that fits the original target to add “size and grit” type of players to the bottom 6. And while I think that Brenden Morrow is a decent addition, I cannot imagine that he would have been near the top of any lists at the beginning of free agency. I do give Rutherford some credit for not compounding the problem by spending all of his remaining budget on the wrong type of player. And adding guys like Palushaj and Gerbe to the mix at least creates more options. And I guess that one option is to save some budget, let the kids have at it to start the season and plan to use the budget to add a player via trade after you figure out where the biggest holes are.
But I am skeptical that the current iteration of the Canes bottom 6 forwards will prove enough better than 2012-13. I think and hope that a couple of the kids will step up, but expecting to plug 4-5 spots with them sounds more like rebuilding and learning on the job than icing a playoff team for 2013-14. But the Canes are not rebuilding. The team is very much trying to end its playoff drought.
What do you think? Can the Canes really fill 4-5 forward slots with kids and be successful? Is there another trade in the works before the season starts? Can you start with the batch of kids and wait until early November to make a key addition?
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