If you are checking in late today, it is actually a fairly busy day on CandC despite the time of year:
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Then this afternoon, the Carolina Hurricanes announced that they had come to terms with restricted free agents Dennis Robertson, Brody Sutter, Keegan Lowe and Brendan Woods. The signings push the Hurricanes contract total to 47 out of a possible 50 and leave only Ryan Murphy yet to be re-signed. The signings themselves are mostly the routine variety. Once the decision to qualify the players was made by the team, it was just a matter of working out details in a fairly narrow range and with minimal negotiating leverage for the players.
There are a couple things that are noteworthy:
Flexibility is maintained. All 4 players were signed for only 1 year which builds out the 2016-17 AHL roster but leaves as much flexibility as possible for 2017-18 and beyond. As the Hurricanes prospect pool continues its makeover and gets younger, older AHLers (Woods and Sutter are 24, Robertson is 25 and Lowe is 23) are more commonly used as complementary players to fill a couple holes left after roster spots are allocated for developing younger prospects.
Nothing extra was given. Brody Sutter got a bit more with his $115,000 AHL salary, but on the whole the players all got pretty standard deals with base AHL salaries less than $100,000 and NHL salaries at or near the minimum.
Last up is Ryan Murphy whose contract situation I touched on earlier today in this post.
Go Canes!
