Free Agency begins tomorrow, and the Kraken have a little over $20 Million in cap space to use it on. Not that they should unless they’re really smart about it; this Free agency class isn’t the greatest.
But the Kraken still need to improve if they want to keep up with the rest of the Pacific Division, and sometimes that means making some decisions on your Restricted Free Agents, which the Kraken did indeed do; choosing to send offers to
- Will Borgen
- Cale Fleury
- Vince Dunn
- Kole Lind
No real disagreement on any of those here; particularly Dunn and Borgen. Fleury and Lind you can probably have for similar money to what they received before if not a couple hundred-thousand more, and could theoretically send to CV if things go south. Dunn and Borgen meanwhile, are critical to this team’s short-and-medium term future.
Of course, that also means they had to consider letting go of certain players like Daniel Sprong, and Morgan Geekie, as they did not receive qualifying offers from Seattle.
Morgan Geekie was someone the Kraken really thought they had value in, and according to Renaud Lavoie of TVASports, were trying to trade all throughout the draft but couldn’t get a biter on. It’s a real shame, he played solid hockey for the Squids this year, and was deeply involved in the community outreach effort of the team.
Daniel Sprong is a bit surprising, given how well he played in the Kraken’s system this year; but I suppose ending up playing well off of a PTO means you expect a significant raise afterwards…and he couldn’t convince the Kraken to give him one.
The cost of doing business in a hard cap league, I suppose. Even the guys you really like can’t stay.
This free agency could be quite interesting itself, as it’s been posited many players will be signing extremely short-term contracts in order to take advantage of a massive theorized jump in Cap space for the entire league for next year. We’ll see if Morgan or Daniel ends up on one of those contracts.
We at DJLR are sad to see them go, but wish them both luck and success wherever they end up.
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