Habs Sign Boyd

The Canadiens didn't take too much time signing Dustin Boyd to a new 1-year contract. Boyd was acquired by the Canadiens in a deal that also brought the exclusive rights of Dan Ellis, who didn't sign with the Canadiens, in exchange for the RFA rights to Sergei Kostitsyn. Boyd's deal is said to be worth $650,000 and he'll be bringing his hard nosed game to Montreal, as well as fitting in the mould as a speedy smaller player in the league.

Between the Flames and the Predators in 2010, Boyd played in 78 games, scored 11 goals and added 13 assists, ranking him 341st in league pool scoring and 234th among forwards.  Those are some awfully deep rankings and you would probably still need to be in a fairly deep draft before you would go ahead and pick him.  He may have the right kind of game to mesh well with a Benoit Pouliot or Tom Pyatt, so he could find some good chemistry right away.

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

The Canadiens have a pretty solid roster built already and are only really missing Carey Price on their must-sign list of players this Summer.  The 17 players on the board above have an annual cap hit of $51.9 million, which still leaves them $7.5 million for the remaining six players they would need for a 23-man roster.  Price would have to take up at least $4 million, if he is going to be the number one guy in Montreal, so that would take a big chunk of the remaining cap space, but there could still be some jockeying between now and October to make it all work.