Daily Roundup: Speculating a Red Wings offer sheet, Roope Hintz inks a three-year deal, and more

Cam Lewis
Cam Lewis
Daily Roundup: Speculating a Red Wings offer sheet, Roope Hintz inks a three-year deal, and more

Welcome to Daily Faceoff’s daily NHL roundup where we bring you the NHL’s most important news and rumours every day. 

Could Steve Yzerman take advantage of the Lightning?

It’s well known that the Tampa Bay Lightning are in a difficult salary cap situation.

The 2020 Stanley Cup Champions are pressed right against the salary cap with two key restricted free agents, @Mikhail Sergachev and @Anthony Cirelli, without contracts.

There’s been talk about the Lightning asking @Steven Stamkos to waive his no-trade clause and there’s been speculation the team could move somebody like @Tyler Johnson or @Ondrej Palat, but it won’t be easy to get a team to take on a big cap hit this off-season with how tight things are around the league.

Over at TSN, Steve Simmons speculates that the Lightning are ripe for the picking when it comes to a free agent offer-sheet and their former general manager might be in the best position to capitalize…

By all rights, it would make sense for Steve Yzerman, general manager of the talent-hungry Red Wings, to make an offer-sheet play for Tampa Bay forward Anthony Cirelli, who is a restricted free agent. Yzerman drafted Cirelli initially and has watched him blossom into a strong contributor on a Stanley Cup winner. So why hasn’t there been an offer made? The suspicion around is that Yzerman has too much respect for Lightning owner Jeff Vinik, whom he worked with for many years, to move in this direction. Tampa Bay has salary-cap issues, the Red Wings don’t: The timing would be perfect for an offer sheet. Just not so long as there are friendships involved

The Red Wings have nearly $10,000,000 left in cap room to work with and they have three second-round picks at the 2021 draft along with their own first-round pick. If anybody was able to execute a big offer-sheet signing, it would be them.

But, as Simmons notes, this wouldn’t be standard NHL operating procedure. We almost never see offer-sheets signed in this league because general managers seem to view it as back-stabbing. Yzerman has a good relationship with Tampa Bay’s ownership and front office. Would he risk that in order to sign a player like Cirelli? Doubtful.

@Roope Hintz inks three-year deal

Another restricted free agent has come to terms.

The Dallas Stars announced that the winger had agreed to a three-year deal worth $3,150,000 annually.

The team’s second-round pick from the 2015 draft has developed into a quality middle-six player in Dallas. In 2019-20, he scored 19 goals and 33 points over 60 games, which is a very-solid 45-point pace over an 82-game season.

The Stars’ off-season looks like it’s pretty much finished. The team has Hintz signed, they signed goaltender Anton Khudobin to a three-year deal earlier, and they don’t have any restricted free agents left to sign. The team has about $2,000,000 in cap room left, which might not be enough to bring back free-agent winger Corey Perry.

Alex Trebek’s last hurrah

Alex Trebek, the beloved host of Jeopardy!, passed away after a long battle with pancreatic cancer on the weekend at the age of 80.

Born in Sudbury, Trebek moved to Ottawa as a teenager and enrolled at the University of Ottawa, taking a degree in Philosophy. After graduating, Trebek began his television career in Ottawa, doing news and weather reports from the network’s offices at the Chateau Laurier hotel.

A legendary Canadian icon and recipient of Ottawa’s Key to the City, it was fitting that one of Trebek’s final hurrahs came at this year’s NHL draft when he announced the Senators’ third-overall pick…

Over at Sportsnet, Wayne Scanlan talked about the process behind getting Trebek to make the selection and how the organization executed the whole thing in secret.

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