Ian Cole Goes to Denver

The Colorado Avalanche landed one of the pool worthy UFA defensemen on Sunday, signing Ian Cole to a new 3-year, $12.75 million deal.  Cole has been bouncing around a little bit in recent years, but has now found himself a good home with the Avalanche, who are starting to shore up their back end a little bit more, one of the spots they really had to focus on in this off-season.

Cole split last season between the Penguins and the Blue Jackets, playing in 67 games, scoring 5 goals and 20 points, good enough for 98th among all defensemen, just inside of the top 100.

The Avalanche blueline is starting to get a good mix of veterans and young stars, to which Cole should slide right in seamlessly.  He won't carry a great deal of the load, with Tyson Barrie still doing much of that on a day-to-day basis, but Cole will be a good second pairing guy and could certainly help kids like Nikita Zadorov and Samuel Girard.

Forwards	Cap	Defense	Cap	Goalies	Cap
Nathan MacKinnon	6.300	Erik Johnson	6.000	Semyon Varlamov	5.900
Gabriel Landeskog	5.500	Tyson Barrie	5.500	Philipp Grubauer	3.333
Carl Soderberg	4.750	Ian Cole	4.250
Colin Wilson	3.938	Nikita Zadorov	2.100
Matt Calvert	2.800	Mark Barberio	1.450
Sven Andrighetto	1.400	Samuel Girard	0.728
Gabriel Bourque	0.950	David Warsofsky	0.650
J.T. Compher	0.925
Alexander Kerfoot	0.925
Dominic Toninato	0.925
Mikko Rantanen	0.894
Tyson Jost	0.886
Vladislav Kamenev	0.833
A.J. Greer	0.742

The current 23-man roster above, projected for the 2019 season, is rounding out quite well and is coming in, well under budget.  I currently have the Avs with $15.3 million in extra cap space, heading into day two of the free agency period.  This is already an exciting team and if they can start putting a couple more key free agents in the squad, they could make a real run at a playoff spot next season.