Spezza Heads to Dallas

A player thought to be dealt at the NHL Entry Draft didn't quite make it out the door on time, rather waited for an hour before the doors flung open for the Free Agent Frenzy.

		2014 Season					2015
To Dallas	Age	Team	GP	G	P		Cap Hit
Jason Spezza	31	OTT	75	23	66		1 year/$7 million
Ludwig Karlsson	23	AHL	0	0	0		1 year/$925,000
To Ottawa
Alex Chiasson	23	DAL	79	13	35		1 year/$866,667
Alex Guptill	22	AHL	0	0	0		2 years/$815,000
Nicholas Paul	19	OHL	0	0	0		Unsigned draft pick
2015 2nd Round Draft Pick

The 2001 2nd overall pick for the Ottawa Senators, Jason Spezza, has indeed moved down to the Lone Star State, for a package that makes the Senators younger, but not necessarily better.

The centrepiece of the deal is the 31-year old centre, Spezza, who has seen some pretty good years in Ottawa, including a great year recently, finishing 9th in hockey pool scoring in 2012.

In 2014, Spezza had 66 points, which was good enough for 43rd overall in the league in pool scoring.  The Senators were not a great team in the 2014 season, so his numbers were definitely a reflection of his skill and now he is taking it to Dallas, where he'll likely be the number two guy behind Tyler Seguin, who is coming up very quickly to be a number one guy in the NHL.

In Ottawa, the departure of Spezza will mean that Kyle Turris will take over as the number one guy for the Senators, which will add some pressure to his game.

Chiasson was the only NHL-playing piece coming back in this deal for the Ottawa Senators and he had shown a few flashes of a reasonable NHL player, but he is far from what the Senators need to make a quick return to the playoffs.  With this deal, it would appear that the Senators are going to be patient with what they have in the stockade, hoping that kids like Mika Zibanejad matures into a top six NHL forward and then also hope that Mark Stone and/or Curtis Lazar can make a full-time jump into the Senators line-up.

In order to make the rebuild a little easier, the Senators were able to drop a lot of salary in this deal, as the difference is over $6 million.  I now have the Senators going into the free agent frenzy with six roster spots open and $25.3 million on cap space.

The Stars, on the other hand, did spend some money in this deal, but you could argue that it was a wise decision in this addition.  Dallas has nine roster spots open, going into the frenzy, and has $14.8 million in space.  It may not add up to much for each of those spots, but looking at what they have in place already, this will mostly be depth players being added towards October.