Canes Sign Peters

Back in the middle of June, the Carolina Hurricanes announced that Justin Peters would take over as Cam Ward's back-up in the 2011 season, even as he was still eligible to become a restricted free agent in July. Well, the calendar clicked over, Peters became an RFA and only on Monday did he re-sign with the club to fully take on that role on everyone's list.

Peters signed a 2-year deal, which is actually a two-way deal, which has a cap hit of $525,000 at the NHL level each year.   Since he was actually publicly announced that he would be the back-up, I am going to add him to the team roster and cap hit, but the two-way deal does give the Hurricanes a little bit of flexibility financially, if Peters isn't to make it.

In 2010, Peters had a good showing with the club while Ward was injured, winning six games in 488 minutes worth of work, which actually ranked him 60th among all goalies with 12 points in pool scoring.  I would imagine that Peters would be a good selection, if he gets the go ahead as the Hurricanes back-up, probably improving on those numbers, even just a little bit.

Forwards	Defense	Goalies
Eric Staal	Joni Pitkanen	Cam Ward
Jussi Jokinen	Tim Gleason	Justin Peters
Brandon Sutter	Anton Babchuk
Tuomo Ruutu
Sergei Samsonov
Chad Larose
Tom Kostopoulos
Erik Cole
Patrick Dwyer

The Hurricanes roster is still a rough estimation at the moment, especially with the self-imposed budget the team has, there could be some curve balls thrown in there to really get us amateur capologists spinning around. The team that I have listed above of 14 players, now comes in with a salary cap figure of $38.5 million. Unfortunately for the Hurricanes, they are going to suffer through a couple of penalties, including Rod Brind'Amour's contract, which he signed over the age of 35, so his $3.6 million will count against and the final year of Frantisek Kaberle's buyout, which hits at $733,333. This brings the team's number up to $42.8 million, for the moment. I would imagine that we could start throwing in some of the team's youth on the table, but we'll wait and see who does what in camp.