Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Habs to Shop

The Canadiens are also finding themselves with quite a bit of freedom, which may allow them to do some fantastic moves in the off-season to re-calibrate their team. They also find themselves with plenty of unrestricted free agents coming through this summer, including Alexei Kovalev, Robert, Lang, Saku Koivu, Alex Tanguay, Mathieu Schneider, Tom Kostopoulos, Patrice Brisebois and Mike Komisarek.

The team also has a number of restricted free agents, which could even be considered trade bait, if they wanted to completely renovate the team. Tomas Plekanec, Guy Latendresse, Matt D'Agostini, Chris Higgins and Kyle Chipchura all come to mind. Where do you focus first?

Let's have a quick peek of what they do have signed then, shall we?

ForwardsDefenseGoaltenders
Andrei KostitsynAndrei MarkovCarey Price
Sergei KostitsynRoman HamrlikJaroslav Halak
Maxim LapierreJosh Gorges
Georges LaraqueRyan O'Byrne

Above, you'll see some good pieces to the final puzzle, in goal (which has been shaky this year, granted) and on the blueline, but the forwards need to be built solid. This group of 10 players does only have a cap hit of $22.5 million, which is the lowest total among all NHL teams for signed roster players for next season. This is why they can be big buyers this off-season... maybe to even buy a bit this deadline. Good news for Habs fans.

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