Coyotes Sign Prucha

On the heels of the announcement of the trade with Florida on Friday, the Coyotes also announced that they signed Petr Prucha to a new 2-year deal. Prucha, acquired from the Rangers at the deadline this past season, finished the 2009 campaign with 19 points in 47 games. With the Rangers, he was a regular healthy scratch through the year, so his move to Phoenix was a healthy one for his career.

Prucha was scheduled to be a restricted free agent with arbitration rights this summer, but the Coyotes seemed to feel comfortable with his talents to sign him well before the frenzy begun. He had a cap hit of $1.6 million last season and we could likely assume that he'll be around that total, give or take a little bit. As of now, there was no word as to the financial details.

Forwards	Defense	Goaltenders
Shane Doan	Ed Jovanovski	Ilya Bryzgalov
Matthew Lombardi	Zbynek Michalek
Peter Mueller	David Hale
Martin Hanzal	Kurt Sauer
Mikael Boedker
Kyle Turris
Petr Prucha
Viktor Tikhonov
Todd Fedoruk

The Coyotes are looking to stay rather young this season, keeping their budget relatively low by the looks of things. Doing so, they should be much more ripe for the pickings when it comes to prospective buyers down the line here. The signing of Prucha should be considered a good one, as he does come with offensive upside, which he wasn't able to realize in New York. Don't look for anything amazing from Prucha in 2010, but he will improve his numbers purely on ice-time, so a deep draft could see Prucha being a good sleeper pick.