The Dominator Returns

What more can a 42 year-old goaltender give to an NHL franchise? Ask Dominik Hasek. He'll be giving the Red Wings one more season after signing the 1-year deal that will pay him as little as $2 million. Hasek played in 56 games (winning 38) in a platoon situation with Chris Osgood. The keeper, who had been plagued with injury in the latter part of his career, had found a great way to keep in game shape and still remain healthy through the season. His 38 wins and 8 shutouts was good enough for 92 points last season, which put him 17th on the pool list.

There's no reason as to why Hasek can't do it all again, well, except for the injury bug. That'll just downright be the end of him, really. If Hasek remains healthy, the Red Wings will continue to win, no matter who's in net. A pretty healthy choice would be to take Hasek in your pool team, but beware of the injury situation.

Now that Hasek is signed up, the gist of the Red Wings line-up has been assembled. Let's see how they've managed to look thus far into the off-season:

Henrik Zetterberg	Pavel Datsyuk	Tomas Holmstrom
Mikael Samuelsson	Daniel Cleary	Johan Franzen
Jiri Hudler	Kris Draper	Kirk Maltby
Valtteri Filppula	Igor Grigorenko	Tomas Kopecky

Nicklas Lidstrom	Brian Rafalski
Niklas Kronvall	Brett Lebda
Chris Chelios	Andreas Lilja

Dominik Hasek

Chris Osgood

This line-up, without salary numbers for Hudler and Grigorenko, sits at just over $40 million, which leaves, let's say, about $9 million less budgeted spending for the trade deadline. Still plenty of cash to pick up a number three defenseman or another top six forward. There is still time to make these decisions, but if the youth movement continues to work, then a guy like Grigorenko or Kopecky could slot in quite nicely.


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