New Feature! Contract Year Tracker

So, everyone knows players tend to try a little extra hard in their contract years. Sure, it's sort of off-putting thinking that they don't try as hard in non-contract years, but such is life. If I ran the NHL, I'd make a rule that players couldn't receive more than a 1-year contract, period the end. You want it? Earn it. F the PA. They can't find their butt with both hands and a flashlight. But I'm hard core like that.

Anyway, another new feature I'm going to do this year is to track players in their contract years. So I went over to nhlnumbers.com and searched for players who are set to be UFAs on 7/1/10. Then, I broke them down by position. Then, since there were so many, I decided to cull it down to sort of my all-UFA team. So I've chosen four each of centers, left wings and right wings, six defensemen and four goalies. I tried to pick a variety of current cap hits, unless the position was just too deep at high end UFAs.

Certainly some of these players will be signed or traded during the season, but we'll keep the list as is throughout, assuming that, if one of them signs somewhere, that might be used as a "comp" for other UFAs.

Here's my All-UFA Team, along with a thumbnail look at how these guys did in the '08-09 regular season to whet your appetite. I'll be doing much more in-depth stats during the season.

Center
name, TM, cap hit, GP, G-A-Pts
Patrick Marleau, SJ, $6.3M, 76, 38-33-71
Olli Jokinen, CGY, $5.25M, 76, 29-28-57
Marc Savard, BOS, $5.00M, 82, 25-63-88
Antoine Vermette, CBJ, $2.76M, 79, 16-25-41

Left Wing
name, TM, cap hit, GP, G-A-Pts
Ilya Kovalchuk, ATL, $6.40M, 79, 43-48-91
Alexander Frolov, LA, $2.90M, 77, 32-27-59
Steve Ott, DAL, $1.425M, 64, 19-27-46
Eric Nystrom, CGY, $688K, 76, 5-5-10

Right Wing
name, TM, cap hit, GP, G-A-Pts
Milan Hejduk, COL, $3.90M, 82, 27-32-59
Lee Stempniak, TOR, $2.50M, 61, 11-20-31
Marek Svatos, COL, $2.05M, 69, 14-20-34
Jordin Tootoo, NAS, $975K, 72, 4-12-16

Defense
name, TM, cap hit, GP, G-A-Pts
Nicklas Lidstrom, DET, $7.45M, 78, 16-43-59
Sergei Gonchar, PIT, $5.0M, 25, 6-13-19
Kim Johnsson, MIN, $4.85M, 81, 2-22-24
Paul Martin, NJ, $3.83M, 73, 5-28-33
Dan Hamhuis, NAS, $2.0M, 82, 3-23-26
Carlo Coliacovo, STL, $1.283M, 63, 3-26-29

Goalie
name, TM, Cap hit, W-L-S, WPCT, GAA, SPCT, SO
Marty Turco, DAL, $5.70M, 33-31-10, 0.446, 2.81, 0.898, 3
Evgeni Nabokov, SJ, $5.375M, 41-12-8, 0.661, 2.44, 0.910, 7
Vesa Toskala, TOR, $4.0M, 22-17-11, 0.415, 3.26, 0.891, 1
Jonas Hiller, ANH, $1.30M, 23-15-1, 0.605, 2.39, 0.919, 4

NiNY