One Year Later: The 2010 Free Agent Impact, Part I

By Alexander Monaghan
Editor-in-chief

Improving your team via free agency continues to become a trend of the past.

Top free agents are re-signed prior to hitting the open market as Patrick Marleau, Tomas Plekanec and Joe Pavelski proved last year as well as Andrei Markov and Brooks Laich this offseason. Of the roughly $675 million spent during the 2010 free agency bender, only a choice few proved valuable additions to their team’s offenses.

More often than not, as fantasy owners, this production is the only thing we care about. Otherwise, a player receives the patented ‘Suck’ label, a definition that becomes increasingly more difficult to shed.

Top free agents like Dan Hamhuis, Zybnyk Michalek and Paul Martin improved their new organizations from the blue line out. As the bigger names on the market their everyday efforts were invaluable to their teams, respectively, but their impact on the box score was somewhat limited, unless we are using TOI as a counting stat.

There are a few theories behind the lack of impact on a national scale.

For one, defensemen take much longer to develop than forwards. Famously, Carolina Hurricanes GM Jim Rutherford argued about the negative effects of drafting defensemen. Rutherford felt that drafting defensemen in the first round is essentially developing a player for another team. During the 2010 NHL Entry Draft he reached for Kitchener Rangers forward Jeff Skinner opposed to taking much higher regarded blue-liners like Cam Fowler or Brandon Gormley. The move proved to be incredibly shrewd and likely created the same domino effect of falling d-men during the 2011 NHL Entry Draft.

A reliable defenseman is a valued commodity once your team is on the right path. A defenseman like Hamhuis — a former first round pick essentially developed for the Vancouver Canucks by the Nashville Predators — helped a winning team gain stability on the back end once the offensive core of Ryan Kesler, Daniel Sedin and Henrik Sedin were already in place. A similar point could be said for Michalek and Martin as they helped stabilize the Pittsburgh Penguins back end, further solidifying the an offense-heavy team.

Players like Brett Clark, Joe Corvo, Toni Lydman, Anton Volchenkov and Pavel Kubina all fit under this category and therefore make a bigger impact than the failed offensive player. However, another reason for their heightened impact is the peak age estimation.

According to Gabriel Desjardins of Artic Ice Hockey, the peak age is right over 25. From Artic Ice Hockey:

Using this theory, very few UFA players fit into the criteria of an improving player. When looking at this past season’s goal scoring leaders, you would have to scroll down 25 names before you found one member of the 2010 UFA class — Ilya Kovalchuk, who experienced a 10-goal decrease in the first season of his shiny new contract.

Considering the earliest, per the CBA, a player can hit unrestricted free agency (excluding the Blake Wheeler collegiate loophole) is 27. Next season, UFAs like Ryan Suter, Alexander Semin, Mikhail Grabovski and Zach Parise will find themselves in that youngest target age bracket. Expect a few to re-sign with their current team well before hitting the “open” market.

Over the next few days, we will look back at the most improved and most regressed free agents in an attempt to rationalize these signings and further predict the outcome of the current and future classes. Stay tuned for parts two and three and please feel free to comment below with your opinions on the matter.

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