Hawks Walk From Niemi, Sign Turco

It's one heck of a news morning out of Chicago, as we all kind of expected. The Blackhawks were forced to walk away from Antti Niemi's arbitration decision of a 1-year $2.75 million deal, making him an unrestricted free agent, instead opting to take on Marty Turco for a 1-year, $1.3 million, saving some much needed cap space for the near future.

Niemi's arbitration decision was either going to make or break the Blackhawks off-season plan and I would have to assume that they were trying to get a deal in place to sign and trade Niemi, just so they didn't have to walk away from the Finnish netminder for nothing, but it doesn't look like anyone valued Niemi that much to help out the Blackhawks or be greedy enough to take him without going into a free agent auction.

So, now the Blackhawks are going with a veteran choice in net and it should save them a good number of pennies to what their other option was to be.  Turco was let go as a free agent by the Dallas Stars, who opted to go with Kari Lehtonen as their number one guy for the coming season, ending an era that included a Stanley Cup in Dallas, thanks in large part to Turco.  Unfortunately, Turco did not have the best 2010 season with the Stars, but by his numbers, it wasn't the worst year either.  In 53 appearances, Turco came away with a 22-20-11 record, which is still technically above .500, with 4 shutouts and 4 assists, giving him 56 pool points in the year, ranking him 23rd among all goalies.  Turco is known to have better numbers, but the team in front of him didn't help him out a great deal and Turco didn't look all that sharp at a number of points in the season either.

Niemi's numbers were better than Turco's, 67 points in 39 appearances for the Blackhawks, splitting time with Cristobel Huet for the better part of the 2010 season.  The only real upgrade the Blackhawks are getting is in the budget and arguably in experience and veteran leadership.  The Blackhawks would have likely preferred to stay with their Cup-winning keeper, but that just wasn't going to be the case at the beginning of the day.

Forwards	Defense	Goalies
Patrick Kane	Duncan Keith	Cristobel Huet
Jonathan Toews	Brian Campbell	Marty Turco
Patrick Sharp	Brent Seabrook
Marian Hossa	Niklas Hjalmarsson
Troy Brouwer	John Scott
Tomas Kopecky
Dave Bolland
Viktor Stalberg

Needless to say, things are not all rosy quite yet in Chicago after this deal, but steps have been taken to move forward anyways. Turco fits underneath Huet for the time being, due to pool points, nothing about job security or status, that's just the way this table operates. The rumour mill is still churning away at what the Hawks are going to do with Huet, which is anyone's guess until it actually happens.

As it stands on the table, the team has eight forwards, five defense and a pair of goalies on there, plus they have that massive $4 million bonus penalty from the 2010 season and the Blackhawks are now currently sitting at $59.32 million against the cap with all that being said. You should be able to slide a prospect into that gap, but that doesn't at all make it into a full team.  Huet's $5.625 million cap hit still looks to be the biggest hurdle that the Hawks have to jump, as they could easily fit a back-up goalie, defenseman and a few forwards onto the roster for that hit, although they'll all likely be more depth players than standouts, but the core group of players will still be substantial.

Regardless of how this deal looks, the Blackhawks had to do something to get all of this resolved, there's very little question about that. The Blackhawks are also far from being done in this off-season, but at least we can see that decisions are beginning to be made.  Quotes surfacing from Blackhawks GM Stan Bowman are suggesting that the team is looking at options for Huet, so we all know the direction of the club, now it's just a matter of seeing them all come to fruition.  I think everyone in the Chicago organization still has some restless nights ahead of them, but will all be glad to see it end and they can concentrate on moving forward and building a solid club with a good foundation.