Hurricanes Re-Sign Unfamiliar Ryan

The Carolina Hurricanes had themselves a hidden gem in forward Derek Ryan, who took a very long road to a full-time NHL job, but when he finally cracked it, he also cracked the top 200 in forward scoring, finishing 198th last season.  It would probably come as no surprise, that no one had him in last year's hockey pool and there still might be some hesitance to pick him up, but I can assure you, he was pool worthy, by definition.

The 30-year old veteran was set to become an unrestricted free agent on July 1st, if he wasn't re-signed by the Hurricanes, but over the weekend and confirmed on Monday, the deal was done, as Ryan signed a 1-year, $1.425 million deal, ensuring that he gets a good raise and the potential for more regular playing time in 2018.

In the 2017 season, Ryan played in 67 games for the Hurricanes, scoring 11 goals and 29 points and he does have 30-point potential for the 2018 season.

The team is slowly coming around and with three goalies in tow, they are likely in the market to make a swap with someone, trying to improve their forward ranks even further.

Forwards	Cap	Defense	Cap	Goalies	Cap
Jordan Staal	6.000	Justin Faulk	4.833	Scott Darling	4.150
Jeff Skinner	5.725	Noah Hanifin	0.925	Cam Ward	3.300
Victor Rask	4.000	Klas Dahlbeck	0.850	Eddie Lack	2.750
Teuvo Teravainen	2.860	Trevor Van Riemsdyk	0.825
Elias Lindholm	2.700	Brett Pesce	0.809
Lee Stempniak	2.500	Ryan Murphy	0.788
Derek Ryan	1.425	Jaccob Slavin	0.743
Joakim Nordstrom	1.275
Sebastian Aho	0.925
Julien Gauthier	0.925
Andrew Poturalski	0.859
Janne Kuokkanen	0.843
Warren Foegele	0.747

The Hurricanes could be taking on a contract or two via trade or they could be strong in the free agency market here in the coming weeks, as their roster is still below the new salary cap floor of $55.4 million, almost $3.6 million below to narrow it down a little further.  With this much space, something has to happen, possibly pushing for a player like Radim Vrbata or even Alexander Radulov, trying to push that cap number up to a suitable number.