Tyler Johnson Gets Seven in Tampa

The Tampa Bay Lightning are almost done with their necessary signings in this off-season, as they were able to lock down forward Tyler Johnson to a long-term extension on Monday, signing the diminutive play-maker to a 7-year, $35 million deal, keeping him in the fold for the foreseeable future.

The 5'8" centre filed for salary arbitration as a restricted free agent this summer, but avoided the process with this long-term deal, that gave him both term and a very reasonable salary for slightly underachieving in the regular season, when you take how well he plays in the playoffs into account.

Injuries in the back half of the 2017 season cost him about 16 games, limiting his season to only 66 games, where he was good enough for 19 goals and 45 points, 113th among all forwards.

In the hockey pool he didn't quite have the high expectations that some may have had on him, as Jeremy had taken him in the 5th round, 101st overall.  That was only about two rounds too early, thanks to the injury problems in the latter part of the season, but with a new addition like Chris Kunitz in the fold, not to mention a healthier Steven Stamkos, there should be added chances for offense in the 2018 season.

Forwards	Cap	Defense	Cap	Goalies	Cap
Steven Stamkos	8.500	Victor Hedman	7.875	Andrei Vasilevskiy	3.500
Ryan Callahan	5.800	Anton Stralman	4.500	Peter Budaj	1.025
Tyler Johnson	5.000	Braydon Coburn	3.700
Nikita Kucherov	4.767	Dan Girardi	3.000
Alex Killorn	4.450	Andrej Sustr	1.950
Chris Kunitz	2.000	Mikhail Sergachev	0.894
Vladislav Namestnikov	1.938	Slater Koekkoek	0.800
J.T. Brown	1.250
Erik Condra	1.250
Yanni Gourde	1.000
Adam Erne	0.874
Cedric Paquette	0.813
Brayden Point	0.662
Cory Conacher	0.650

The Lightning still have to re-sign forward Ondrej Palat and with their current projected 23-man roster above, they have $6.97 million left in cap space underneath the ceiling.  I don't foresee Palat taking up all of that extra hit, but he'll be in line for a pretty good chunk of that remaining business, likely similar to the deal that Johnson signed yesterday.