This week’s NHL Power Rankings article takes a look at which hockey teams are going to have the most difficult summers, and whose will be the easiest.
Once the Stanley Cup has been awarded, the quest toward the 2019-2020 season officially begins. Teams will spend the summer re-tooling, replenishing their roster, and recovering from a long season. This week’s NHL Power Rankings will look at which teams have easy offseasons, and which ones don’t.
The order of operations is as follows. The first round of the draft is on June 21, with the remaining six rounds the following day. Between then and July 1 is the time where teams can officially start re-signing their free agents (both restricted and unrestricted) to new contracts, as well as negotiate extensions will players on expiring contracts. Teams will also be able to bid on unrestricted free agents, but can’t sign any until July 1, where all bets are off.
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Usually, after the dust has settled after a week or so, not much happens between then and training camps. So let’s take a look at that frenetic couple of weeks where so much gets done.
Some teams have more to do than others. Some teams have a lot more to do than others. Others have far fewer resources to use than others. This is what we’re going to be checking out here.
We are ranking teams from easiest summer plans to hardest. The criteria we will be using is as follows -cap space, pending free agents both big and small, restricted and unrestricted alike, roster size needed, and draft picks for this season. The more cap space and picks you have, the better off you are. The more free agents and roster spots needed to fill, well, it’s more work. You get the drill by now.
All salary cap numbers are from our friends at CapFriendly.com (and are based on if the salary cap next year is $83M), as are the draft pick possessions. Feel free to reference that site as we go along.