Just had a pretty eventful second off-season, where we were looking to improve on last year's success. The draft was as expected, very weak, but the real work was to be done post July 1st. Was looking to add two things we felt this team lacked up front. Sized and grit. We felt this team was just to easy to play against, with a soft bottom six.
First was looking for a big strong forward, which outside of Penner, this team really lacks. Looked into many names, Horton, Carter, Perry, both Staal's to name a few. But as one could imagine, they weren't giving them away. Headed over to TB to see if they wanted to shed some salary, in the form of Lecavalier. They just added Havlat, so they didn't mind trading Vinny, but wanted a dman back. Plante played sparingly with me last year as a call-up, which made me feel comfortable moving a defenseman. Signed Grebeshkov as a RFA last year, at around 1.3, so i had to wait a week before trading him. They obviously wanted more, so I added in O'Sullivan, who though he played well this year, is just to small and soft for me.
The trade boiled down to: Grebeshkov and O'Sullivan for Lecavalier
As for UFA's, after looking at the defense corp and being content with it, we went looking to create a grittier bottom six. Originally wanted to grab both Brind'Amour and Rick Rypien to boost the weak bottom six, but Rob didn't want to come for minimum wage. Ended up getting luck, and found the exact player we were looking for in Rob Niedermayer. After not re-signing Nilsson, demoting Brule from 3rd line duties to the AHL, and signing Tyler Seguin to man the 3rd line with Rob, we feel the bottom six should be tougher to play against this year.
And that's my novel for this season.
