There was a lot of free agent action yesterday via signings and trades. According to Cap Friendly there were 121 signings yesterday. They totaled 234 years. The contracts were worth $700,874,001(!). Some big names are switching teams and some of it I get and some of it I don’t. In this blog I’m going to talk about the teams I do NOT get.

Florida Panthers

Dale Tallon’s computerless approach is going to hurt him this offseason. You never want to give goalies max term. It is even crazier when the player is already 30 years old. Yeah, he’s a former two-time winner of the Vezina Trophy, but goalies break down. The 10.5M should have been able to shave some years off, but it didn’t. The team will have to deal with a recapture fee from the Luongo retirement so that is another 1.094M tied up in “goaltending”. What makes this signing even more dumb is what they did at the draft. They knew they were getting Bobrovsky and they still drafted Spencer Knight at #13 overall. When is that kid going to play? Because either the Bobrovsky contract is a failure and the kid is playing or the draft pick was pointless because he has to wait forever to play. Dale Tallon strikes me as the guy who thinks goaltenders “take longer to develop” and you can wait it out until their mid-twenties.

Then there’s the Anton Stralman contract. What year is it? Stralman was an analytics darling for a number of years, but that time has come and gone. The aging curve has struck and there is no way he should be getting 5.5M for three years.

Brett Connolly was a very good signing for the Panthers, but when combined with the other two it doesn’t do enough.

Minnesota

Paul Fenton is a strange guy

"I told him when I was talking to him that he's like a lizard, the way a lizard takes his tongue and sticks it as far as it does and retrieves what it was trying to do." — GM Paul Fenton on @Zuccarello36

📰 → https://t.co/2V4Lig6AeV #mnwild pic.twitter.com/2tjfFXo1GJ

— Minnesota Wild (@mnwild) July 1, 2019

Fenton on #mnwild draft: "The thing I liked is when guys came up to our table and they were way taller than me. We’ve had some smaller prospects, good hockey players, but every time somebody came up and they were much taller, you got a smile on a lot of our faces."

— Michael Russo (@RussoHockey) June 22, 2019

He also seems way under qualified for the job

The Wild franchise is an afterthought in the league. It drips of mediocrity. Mats Zuccarello is a good player, but what is that supposed to do for a team who missed their window to succeed and has no plan of action to retool or rebuild. Nothing about the Wild makes sense. Paul Fenton is nuts.

Pittsburgh Penguins

No team loves bidding against themselves for bottom line forwards and bottom pairing defenseman like Jim Rutherford has. Brandon Tanev is a third/fourth line tweener. They paid him only 400k less and two years longer than Joonas Donskoi. It will force the Penguins to move another mid-tier contract off the roster. If the contract moved isn’t Jack Johnson or Erik Gudbranson they will have effectively made their team worse for the second time in a week. The Phil Kessel trade made them worse. The benefit of the Kessel trade was supposed to be the cap space. The cap space is now gone on a depth player who cashed in.

Brandon Tanev isn't bad at what he's supposed to be. It's just that what he does isn't worth what he was given and the Penguins have used up all their wiggle room for screw ups. If this was Rutherford's only faux pas you could survive, but it isn't. You have Johnson, Gudbranson, and Hornqvist all eating up cap space they probably won't perform to. That includes Tanev.

Finally checking out some of the signings. A lot of shenanigans. More than expected. Not sure where to begin.

Why is Brandon Tanev getting 6x$3.5m from the Penguins? I don’t know why this one sticks out. Just seems bizarre.

— Nick Mercadante (@NMercad) July 1, 2019

Of all the crazy stuff, this is the deal today that I'm still having the most trouble wrapping my head around. I just have so, so many questions.

— Jeff Veillette (@JeffVeillette) July 2, 2019

New York Islanders

Lou Lamoriello doing Lou Lamoriello things

Here are Robin Lehner's full comments on how things went down with the Islanders. Not a good look. pic.twitter.com/N18Oot20x5

— Ben Pope (@BenPopeCST) July 2, 2019

Robin Lehner wanted to stay and Lou played hardball so he could end up with Semyon Varlamov on a four-year 20M contract?

He also struck out on Artemi Panarin. The Anders Lee signing is fine, but they are a team in neutral who relied heavily on their goaltender last year and now that goaltender is gone. Might not have the same magic on the Island next year. Lou will be to blame.

Vancouver

We saw this slow motion accident coming weeks ago. The Tyler Myers signing is now official. The Canucks seemed to be bidding against themselves. What they got wasn’t great

Tyler Myers (5x6m with Vancouver) is very defensively weak, both at 5v5 and at 4v5, doesn't help a power-play to speak of and has a rough penalty differential. He is, however, very tall. pic.twitter.com/DlyVqN0Tw1

— Micah Blake McCurdy (@IneffectiveMath) July 1, 2019

If the Canucks want to try to get out of this contract…

$16 million in signing bonuses for Myers in next three years, all due on Sep. 1 instead of July 1

buyout proof *and* trade proof.

well done, Jim.

— nobody (@petbugs13) July 1, 2019

Hopefully Elias Pettersson and Brock Boeser can escape Jim Benning at some point.

Thanks for reading!

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