Red Wings Add Daley

The Detroit Red Wings were not in any position to make a real big splash in the free agency window, but they did manage to snag one key player off the list, defenseman Trevor Daley.

The 33-year old defender signed a 3-year, $9.5 million deal on Saturday, rounding out a pretty impressive top five defense corps in Detroit.

Daley was a part of the Stanley Cup winning Pittsburgh Penguins team in the 2017 season, where he had a pretty good regular season, as well as playoffs, scoring 5 goals and 19 points in only 56 games during the year, ranking him 86th among all defensemen.

It's a pretty full looking blueline in Detroit, with some pretty big minute guys already on the roster, so Daley will have to earn his ice-time or at the very least, find some good chemistry with one of the other four defensemen and he could work his way into some more minutes.

The Red Wings are not looking too deep at the forward position yet, so if he can help generate more offense from the blueline, this team would be miles better for it.

Forwards	Cap	Defense	Cap	Goalies	Cap
Henrik Zetterberg	6.083	Mike Green	6.000	Jimmy Howard	5.292
Frans Nielsen	5.250	Danny DeKeyser	5.000	Petr Mrazek	4.000
Gustav Nyquist	4.750	Niklas Kronwall	4.750
Justin Abdelkader	4.250	Jonathan Ericsson	4.250
Johan Franzen	3.955	Trevor Daley	3.178
Darren Helm	3.850	Nick Jensen	0.813
Riley Sheahan	2.075	Ryan Sproul	0.625
Luke Glendening	1.800
Dylan Larkin	0.925
Evgeny Svechnikov	0.894
Anthony Mantha	0.863
Eric Tangradi	0.650
Tyler Bertuzzi	0.645
Matt Lorito	0.638

With Johan Franzen's contract on the books, for now, I am showing the Red Wings with only $1.4 million in cap space to play with.  Franzen will likely be heading to LTIR when the season opens, but that extra cap space is now likely going to make its way to Tomas Tatar and/or Andreas Athanasiou, who are both restricted free agents this summer.

Without a lot of scoring depth on this team, offense is going to be hard to come by, which will make them less of an option for the hockey pool draft this fall.  I don't see very many options for this team for the early rounds, but if you're able to sneak a couple of these guys midway through the draft, mainly on the blueline, you're probably doing yourself quite the favour.