Red Wings Settle With Mrazek

The salary cap crunch has become real with the Detroit Red Wings and they now have a number to work towards, as they have re-signed goaltender Petr Mrazek to a 2-year, $8 million deal, putting another $4 million against their cap hit for the coming season and putting them over the ceiling for the time being.

Mrazek was headed for an arbitration hearing of his own, but in his case, the team had filed for the hearing, but that didn't stop the two sides from coming to an agreement early.

The 24-year old Czech keeper moved into the team's number one role in the 2016 season, usurping it from Jimmy Howard, appearing in 54 games, winning 27 of them and finishing with 64 points on the season, good enough for 13th among all goalies in the league.

The Red Wings have certainly made moves to keep their streak of playoff appearances alive, which is good news for the goaltending pair, meaning that they should be able to register their fair share of wins in whatever percentage split of playing they each get.  The split of time last season does seem to be one that would make sense for the upcoming season, but with their cap hit troubles, one would also have to assume that Howard is on the trading block and if he goes, Mrazek would assume more ice-time.

Before the regular season starts, the NHL does allow teams to carry a cap number that is 10% greater than the cap ceiling, meaning that this year, teams can have $7.3 million in extra space for their tagged roster and with this signing, one could assume that the Red Wings are about $3.3 million over, if they carried the 23-man roster below.  We're still waiting on a health update on Johan Franzen in this off-season, as he could play a huge role in cap relief, if he is still reeling from concussion problems and needs to go back on the LTIR.  Otherwise, a trade will likely have to be made to free up even more space.

Forwards	Cap	Defense	Cap	Goalies	Cap
Henrik Zetterberg	6.083	Mike Green	6.000	Jimmy Howard	5.292
Frans Nielsen	5.250	Danny DeKeyser	5.000	Petr Mrazek	4.000
Gustav Nyquist	4.750	Niklas Kronwall	4.750
Justin Abdelkader	4.250
Tomas Tatar	2.750
Thomas Vanek	2.600
Dylan Larkin	0.925
Johan Franzen	3.955	Jonathan Ericsson	4.250
Darren Helm	3.850	Brendan Smith	2.750
Riley Sheahan	2.075	Alexey Marchenko	1.450
Joe Vitale	1.117
Drew Miller	1.025
Tomas Jurco	0.900
Luke Glendening	0.628
		Brian Lashoff	0.650
Evgeny Svechnikov	0.894	Dan Renouf	0.768	Jake Paterson	0.628
Dylan Sadowy	0.881	Filip Hronek	0.726	Jared Coreau	0.613
Anthony Mantha	0.863	Robbie Russo	0.680	Edward Pasquale	0.575
Teemu Pulkkinen	0.813	Vili Saarijarvi	0.662
Steve Ott	0.800	Joe Hicketts	0.610
Axel Holmstrom	0.687	Nick Jensen	0.588
Dominic Turgeon	0.662
Eric Tangradi	0.650
Zach Nastasiuk	0.648
Tyler Bertuzzi	0.645
Martin Frk	0.639
Matt Lorito	0.638
Andreas Athanasiou	0.628
Tomas Nosek	0.613
Ben Street	0.600
Mitchell Callahan	0.600

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