Coyotes Sign Both Murphy & Stone

The Arizona Coyotes' Summer has had a full plate of action thus far and a couple more key signings on Thursday afternoon nearly rounds out all the list of important things to get done in the off-season.

First, the team announced that they had re-signed 23-year old defender Connor Murphy to a new 6-year, $23.1 million deal, opting to keep him as part of the core for the long term.  Not long after the dust settled on that announcement, they went back to the Twitter account and announced that they avoided arbitration with defenseman Michael Stone, signing a 1-year, $4 million deal, bridging the 26-year old to the unrestricted free agent market, if an extension isn't done in the New Year.

Of the two, Stone had the better season in 2016, finishing with 36 points in 75 games, ranking 36th among all defensemen and certainly situates himself for a good selection in this year's draft.  Murphy, on the other hand, is still coming along, but the new deal suggests that he is up with the club to stay and there will be expectations for bigger and better things, improving upon his 17 points in 78 games last season.

The early projections for the two are roughly in the same neighbourhood as last season, with Stone staying level at about 35 points, while Murphy is up to 20 points, but those can certainly change as we move through training camp.

Only one restricted free agent remains, forward Tobias Rieder, and he is pool worthy, so he'll get a little bit of fanfare on the blog when he re-signs.  Currently, the Coyotes have a 23-man roster, plus two salary cap castoffs, bringing their projected cap hit to $69.2 million, leaving about $3.8 million for Rieder's new deal, which shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Forwards	Cap	Defense	Cap	Goalies	Cap
Shane Doan	5.000	Oliver Ekman-Larsson	5.500	Mike Smith	5.667
Antoine Vermette	3.750	Alex Goligoski	5.475	Louis Domingue	1.050
Jamie McGinn	3.333	Michael Stone	4.000
Martin Hanzal	3.100	Connor Murphy	3.850
Brad Richardson	2.080	Luke Schenn	1.250
Max Domi	0.894	Kevin Connauton	1.000
Anthony Duclair	0.773
Ryan White	1.000	Zbynek Michalek	3.200
Dylan Strome	0.894
Brendan Perlini	0.863
Christian Dvorak	0.839
Jordan Martinook	0.613
Craig Cunningham	0.600
Chris Mueller	0.600
Pavel Datsyuk	7.500	Chris Pronger	4.921
Nick Merkley	0.894	Anthony DeAngelo	0.863	Adin Hill	0.726
Henrik Samuelsson	0.894	Klas Dahlbeck	0.750	Marek Langhamer	0.648
Tyler Gaudet	0.874	Kyle Wood	0.718	Justin Peters	0.600
Christian Fischer	0.853	Jarred Tinordi	0.700
Ryan MacInnis	0.798	Dysin Mayo	0.653
Laurent Dauphin	0.776	Jamie McBain	0.650
Michael Bunting	0.668	Justin Hache	0.640
Conor Garland	0.663	Dakota Mermis	0.627
Stefan Fournier	0.633
Matia Marcantuoni	0.608
Garret Ross	0.600

Pool worthy, non-pool roster players, assumed roster fill-ins,  injured/retired cap hits, in the system