Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Thrashers Moving Forward

The Thrashers organization cannot be terribly disappointed with their summer so far. They have added some reasonable pieces to their puzzle, including Nik Antropov and Pavel Kubina, which should add just that extra little bit of offense to the mix. This should move the Thrashers in the right direction, but there still seems to be a lack of reasonable scoring depth in Atlanta, which I'm sure they are hoping can be solved by adding Evander Kane, the fourth overall pick, to the mix.

Looking below at the blueline for Atlanta, I have reason to believe that it should be picked over pretty well when the fantasy drafts roll around. The top four defenders all have scoring potential attached to their name, as they all finished in the top 100 in defenseman scoring last season.

ForwardsDefenseGoaltenders
Ilya KovalchukPavel KubinaKari Lehtonen
Slava KozlovRon HainseyJohan Hedberg
Todd WhiteTobias Enstrom
Nikolai AntropovZach Bogosian
Bryan LittleNathan Oystrick
Rich Peverley

Colby Armstrong

Marty Reasoner

Jim Slater

Chris Thorburn

Eric Boulton


The Thrashers are also likely working on a fixed budget for 2010, as they are slowly approaching the cap floor this summer. They currently stand having 18 players signed at a combined cap hit of $44 million. It leaves them ample playing room for some more talent, if they wish to spend it or leaves them with less room for financial failure at the end of the day.

I would imagine that we'll see some more young talent jump into the line-up, like Kane or Angelo Esposito, to help boost the team's scoring ability at a reasonable cost.

Rough & tumble defender, Boris Valabik, is the only major RFA left to be signed this summer, but cap space certainly isn't an issue.

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