Kraken likely to deal with own players first before looking at free agent market
SEATTLE – Free agency begins in earnest Saturday for all NHL teams, although the Kraken are expected to be focused more on keeping their own players this summer than going after others the way they did a year ago.
Last year’s additions of Andre Burakovsky, Justin Schultz and Martin Jones on the day free agency opened, paired with Jaden Schwartz and Philipp Grubauer being signed in the early stages two summers ago formed a key part of the team’s recent playoff season. But now, with the foundational core of the NHL roster established, the Kraken seem likely to wait out the early weeks of free agency and attempt instead to use salary cap space to land somebody another team can’t afford.
“I don’t see us being as active in free agency as we were last year just based on where our roster is,” Kraken general manager Ron Francis said in an interview this week. “But that doesn’t mean we’re not open to looking at things whether it’s free agency, trades, what have you, to try to make our roster better. We’ll certainly explore all of those things.”
It was several weeks into free agency last year that Francis pried the contract of winger Oliver Bjorkstrand away from the Columbus Blue Jackets for the cost of a mere fourth-round draft pick. Francis should have a few million dollars’ worth of cap space to absorb another such costly player this season once he’s done dealing with his team’s pending free agents – the biggest being restricted free agent (RFA) defenseman Vince Dunn.
Francis has until 2 p.m. Friday to make qualifying offers to RFA candidates Dunn, Morgan Geekie, Daniel Sprong, Will Borgen, Cale Fleury and minor leaguer Kole Lind. Players gain RFA eligibility after three years and before their six-year unrestricted free agent (UFA) status is gained.
The players could balk at accepting those RFA offers and hope for a bid from another team – though this rarely happens – which the Kraken could then match to automatically keep them. All of the Kraken’s RFA players also have arbitration rights and could exercise them within the next week to try to seek a one-year deal for more money and use the pending hearing as leverage against the Kraken during ongoing negotiations.
That could be something that causes the Kraken to not make an RFA offer by Friday to Sprong, who could see a significant arbitration raise given his 21 goals as a fourth-liner last season. If the Kraken are not convinced Sprong can repeat that – or remain concerned by his two-way play – they could simply not make him an offer and he’d become an unrestricted free agent.
For now, Carson Soucy, Ryan Donato, Joonas Donskoi and Jones are the Kraken’s only UFA players and not expected to be re-signed before Saturday. That leaves them free to go elsewhere, though the Kraken could always sign them to free-agent deals later on once the market settles a bit – as could any NHL team.
Francis had until Friday afternoon to bolster his remaining cap space by $3 million through a one-time buyout of goaltender Chris Driedger’s salary – something the GM said earlier this week he would not do.
“I don’t think we have anybody we’re looking to buy out,” he said. “So, I don’t think we’re looking to do that.”
Driedger hasn’t played for the Kraken since tearing his ACL during last summer’s IIHF World Hockey Championships and is owed $4.5 million this coming season to effectively serve as Grubauer’s backup. The Kraken also have goalie Joey Daccord in the AHL and watched him help lead the Coachella Valley Firebirds within a victory of capturing the Calder Cup championship.
Daccord is a pending “Group 6” unrestricted free agent as a player more than 25 years old who’s played at least three professional seasons, and the Kraken had until Friday to negotiate exclusively with him. If Daccord eventually re-signs, he and Driedger could come to camp to battle things out for a backup role with the loser assuming the AHL job.
For now, the pending Dunn deal is the one to watch as he’s a year from UFA status and the Kraken will undoubtedly try to lock him up for either a seven- or eight-year term approaching $8 million annually. Dunn is coming off a breakout season, though prior inconsistencies could give the Kraken pause about his contract length.
Still, the team doesn’t have much choice as Dunn could play this coming season on a one-year, arbitrator-mandated deal and then hit the open market a year from now in unrestricted form.
The Kraken following the recent NHL draft are a team loaded up more heavily on forward prospects than defensemen and can’t really afford to lose a mid-20s defender such as Dunn just entering his prime. It’s within the next three years that many Kraken prospects will be cracking the roster in larger numbers to replace expiring contracts of the current core and AHL rookie Ryker Evans for now is seemingly the team’s lone NHL-ready blueline draftee.
Jamie Oleksiak and Adam Larsson will see their contracts expire three years from now, while Schultz has just one more season to go leaving Dunn as the team’s best-suited defender to assume a leading role.
The team appears much better stocked up front for once initial Kraken expansion holdovers Jordan Eberle, Yanni Gourde, Alex Wennberg and Schwartz see their contracts expire within the next three seasons. They already have Burakovsky, Bjorkstrand and Jared McCann under contract four more seasons apiece, with former first-round picks Matty Beniers and Shane Wright under control numerous years to come as well plus this week’s first-rounder in winger Eduard Sale and a host of second- and third-round centers and wingers as well.
For now, the Kraken will likely keep developing current NHL defenders Borgen and Fleury while waiting to see where others such Evans, last summer’s second-rounder Ty Nelson and 2021 fourth-rounder Ville Ottavainen eventually fit. In other words, even if he pays blueline RFA candidates a little more than he wants in coming weeks, Francis isn’t really in as good a position to let those players walk as he is some of his forwards.