Pouliot & Pyatt With New Deals

The Montreal Canadiens signed a pair of potential restricted free agents on Monday to new 1-year deals. According to a report today, Benoit Pouliot signed a 1-year deal worth $1.375 million and Tom Pyatt signed a 1-year one-way deal worth $500,000.  Both players were pretty good for the Canadiens in the back end of the season and into the playoffs, earning their new deals before they were technically without a deal on Thursday.

In the 2010 regular season, Pouliot had 17 goals and 11 assists in 53 games between the Minnesota Wild and Montreal Canadiens, ranking him 211th among all forwards in the league in scoring.  The best part about those numbers were what he had done with the Canadiens, picking up 24 of those 28 points in 39 games since the trade.  He quickly became a favourite among those in Montreal.  Unfortunately, the playoffs were not so kind to Pouliot, as he only managed 2 assists in 18 games with the club.

Pyatt wasn't quite as instrumental in the regular season as Pouliot was, picking up 5 points in 40 games in his rookie season with the Canadiens.  In the playoffs, Pyatt ran more with a fourth line role on the team, scoring 4 points in 18 games in the post-season.  Pyatt was dealt to the Canadiens a year ago from the Rangers in the deal that included Scott Gomez coming with him for Christopher Higgins and a package.  With the one-way deal, we can assume Pyatt is pretty much a lock to make the squad, barring some major transactions that may bump him down a little.

Forwards	Defense	Goalies
Tomas Plekanec	Andrei Markov
Scott Gomez	Roman Hamrlik
Mike Cammalleri	Jaroslav Spacek
Brian Gionta	Hal Gill
Andrei Kostitsyn	Josh Gorges
Benoit Pouliot	Ryan O'Byrne
Travis Moen	P.K. Subban
Tom Pyatt

With the additions of Pouliot and Pyatt to the table of signed players expected to make the roster, the salary cap figure now goes up to $50.2 million for the 15 players above. That total currently ranks them 5th in the league in this category, according to my spreadsheet.  The biggest question mark left to worry about for the Canadiens will be the cap amount given to Carey Price for the 2011 season and that should determine how much money is then left for the remaining forwards to fill out the roster.