A qualifying offer snafu to seven restricted free agents, like the one that bedeviled the Blackhawks in 2009, could affect the Predators’ ability to keep star defenseman Shea Weber. (Danny Murphy/Icon SMI)

By Stu Hackel

With the NHL’s free agent signing period set to begin at noon on Friday, July 1, here’s what each team in the West will likely be looking for on the open market. This blog entry will be continually updated between now and then, so check back. For Eastern Conference teams, click here.

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Look for the deep-pocketed Rangers to make a handsome pitch for big fish UFA Brad Richards, who wants to play for a Stanley Cup contender (which would likely rule out Toronto). (Michael Pimentel/Icon SMI)

By Stu Hackel

With the NHL’s free agent signing period set to begin at noon on Friday, July 1, here’s what each team in the East will likely be looking for on the open market. This blog entry will be periodically updated as signings occur between now and then, so check back. For the Western Conference teams, click here.

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The NHL’s return to Winnipeg has inspired hope that Teemu Selanne will come back, too. (TSN/Icon SMI)

By Stu Hackel

The Hockey Hall of Fame announced its 2011 inductees on Tuesday and two future Hall of Famers — Jaromir Jagr and Teemu Selanne — will make decisions about their NHL futures before the beginning of the free agency season on  July 1.

Eric Stephens of the Orange County Register reported over the weekend that Ducks GM Bob Murray remained uncertain about whether Selanne will return to the Ducks for another season or choose retirement. Apparently, what’s preventing the Finnish veteran from deciding is lingering concern over his left knee, which was reconstructed in 2005.

“His knee acted up a bit,” Murray said. “Doctors have looked at it. I think as soon as he’s pretty sure that his knee is fine … I think he wants to play hockey again. We’re just trying to see how the knee goes.”

The euphoria in Winnipeg, where Selanne began his career, over getting NHL hockey again has now extended to dreaming that Teemu will play his last season where he started. The Winnipeg Free Press turned a quote from someone who knows but does not represent Selanne into a story speculating that it might happen. But seven paragraphs into the story, Selanne’s agent slapped the dreamers awake.

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Ex-Wild blueliner Brent Burns will help the Sharks, but at a very steep price. (Mark Humphrey/AP)

By Stu Hackel

With apologies to my friend and colleague Adrian Dater, saying for certain which NHL teams were winners and losers during all the trading and drafting that began last week is as risky as the draft itself — which essentially tries to project which teenaged players will make it to the NHL sometime in the next few years. Various researchers have shown that only about 16 percent of the kids who are drafted have decent careers — in some years, that figure has dropped to nearly 11 percent — and almost all the success stories come from first- and second-rounders.

While we’ll need time to watch how these young players develop, there were a number of interesting moves during the weekend that will have a more immediate impact. It’s worth venturing a few thoughts on them.
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(Jeff Carter (left) and Mike Richards had productive but stormy tenures in Philadelphia. (Photo by Vincent Muzik/Icon SMI)

By Stu Hackel

The Flyers moved to drastically change the face of their team on Thursday by trading two of their core players, captain Mike Richards and winger/center Jeff Carter in separate deals. By doing so, they cleared cap space to sign goalie Ilya Bryzgalov to a fat, long-term contract. In the process, they dealt the Blue Jackets a center in Carter who will finally give Columbus a strong linemate for Rick Nash. And the Kings get a leader and experienced center in Richards who can anchor a second line behind Anze Kopitar and give LA the depth in the middle to challenge some of their more successful Western Conference rivals, like the Canucks who have Henrik Sedin and Ryan Kesler as their top two centers.

Here are the deals: First, Philly sent Carter — who has scored 36, 33 and 46 goals in his last three seasons — to Columbus in exchange for 21-year-old Jakub Voracek, a highly-skilled (although not especially physical) right wing, plus their first round (8th overall) and third round draft picks.

Carter has 11-years remaining on a contract that freed up over $5.272 million for the Flyers, who acquired the rights to the 31-year-old Bryzgalov two weeks ago from the Coyotes in hopes of solving their decades-long problem in goal.

For the Blue Jackets, who had the cap room for Carter, it’s a chance to get someone to partner with Nash, their captain and top scorer who has lacked an impact center for his entire eight-year career in Columbus. Carter was a center prior to joining the Flyers, but often played right wing on a line with Richards. He prefers center, however, and this could be exactly what Nash and the Blue Jackets need to energize their team and fan base.

The eighth overall pick in this year’s draft could give the Flyers a very good NHL prospect depending on who is picked prior to them drafting in that spot.

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Red Deer center Ryan Nugent-Hopkins is considered the top of a weak crop. (Lionel Switzer/Icon SMI)

By Stu Hackel

The names of Stanley Cup champions Todd Marchand and Tyler Seguin, plus Jeff Skinner — who won the Calder Trophy as top NHL rookie on Wednesday — Michael Grabner, and most of their fellow first-year NHL cohorts weren’t as widely known a year ago as they are now. But being drafted by an NHL club gave them the opportunity to show their stuff at the game’s top level, and that opportunity will be extended to another 210 players this weekend. The seven-round NHL Entry Draft, which begins in St. Paul on Friday evening and continues on Saturday, will be many fans’ introductions to names they’ll be hearing and seeing in the NHL sometime in the future.

Follow the draft as it happens on the SI.com Draft Tracker.

Unlike fans of pro football and pro basketball who are more able to follow the exploits of the top college stars in those sports, the majority of NHL fans only get vague glimmers of recognition or even draw blanks for the names Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Adam Larsson, Jonathan Huberdeau, Gabriel Landeskog, and Sean Couturier. For scouts, draft geeks and fans of junior and college hockey, however, these names are quite familiar as young players whose progress they’ve tracked for a while. And that progress frames the drama — and the tedium — that will play out this weekend on the draft floor.
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Given the rugged nature of the position, a defenseman hasn’t won the Lady Byng Trophy (gentlemanly play) since 1954, but Nicklas Lidstrom of the Red Wings truly deserves it. (Robin Alam/Icon SMI)

By Stu Hackel

The NHL hands out its regular season awards on Wednesday evening in Las Vegas, a venue that just oozes hockey history and tradition. Actually, the “nominees-winner” Academy Awards-style format is as artificial as Vegas glitz because the “nominees” are not nominees at all but actually the top three vote-getters from the April balloting (here’s who SI.com’s Michael Farber chose) after the votes are tabulated. So the winner has already been determined when the nominees are announced. This format transforms the known into the suspenseful, so maybe Vegas is the right venue after all.
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Brad Marchand and the Bruins gave as good they got in the playoffs, but in the end, Boston was mentally tougher than its opponents during the long march to the Stanley Cup. (Anne-Marie Sorvin/US Presswire)

By Stu Hackel

While joy justifiably reigns in Boston, the Bruins and their fans are the only group that gets to celebrate. Like the notes of support that people are still leaving on Vancouver police cars, there are some important leftover thoughts to express in the aftermath of the B’s seven-game Stanley Cup triumph, many about what we’ve learned about the state of the game this year and where things might go.

Some of that concerns hockey’s fan culture, one we all celebrate for its loyalty and passion but one that also engenders such hostility that fans rioted in the aftermath of Game 7, making the championship a secondary story. It gave a wonderful city a huge emotional wound and tarred hockey in the process.

To the world at large, hockey fan violence was the culprit. A lot has been written and speculated about what occurred last Wednesday night in the streets of Vancouver. And what I’ve read and watched from afar indicates that while the instigators of this terrible event were not necessarily hockey fans, but organized criminals who would have rioted win or lose (as they apparently tried to do at the Vancouver Olympics, but were thwarted due to prior police knowledge– they adjusted their tactics and such to avoid detection this time), fans certainly joined in, swept up in the mindless mob mentality of the moment.

But they don’t get sucked into that vortex quite so easily if the passions around the game don’t overflow out of control into such extreme blind rage and what was really mass insanity.
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Bruins stars Brad Marchand and Tim Thomas are two of the NHL season’s biggest surprise success stories. (Shaun Best/Reuters)

By Stu Hackel

The two most compelling figures of the Stanley Cup Final were the Bruins’ Tim Thomas, a 37-year-old goalie who had a spectacular season and postseason, and Brad Marchand,  a 23-year-old rookie who is still learning what the NHL is all about, but learning fast.
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Coach Claude Julien took lots of heat as he patiently guided his team on its long, hard road to the title. (Andy Clark/Reuters)

By Stu Hackel

When the 2010-11 season was around a dozen weeks old, the Bruins went into a brief tailspin and some fans, bloggers and media types felt that coach Claude Julien was the wrong guy to run this team. Too defensive-oriented, they charged, Too predictable. Unwilling to shake up his team or mix up his lines…

Unfazed, Julien stuck with his plan and the Bruins finished atop the Northeast Division. When the playoffs began, the Boston media speculated that he’d have to win at least two rounds or he’d be gone, especially coming off the Bruins’ historic playoff collapse against Philadelphia the previous spring after having led the series 3-0. And when the B’s went down 2-0 to Montreal in the opening round, the gravediggers went reaching for their shovels.

This morning, Claude Julien is the coach of the Stanley Cup champions, something he greatly deserves. Which only goes to prove that what is said or written in the media and among fans has — or should have — little to zero impact upon what happens when the puck drops.

You often hear players and coaches in the playoffs talk about tuning out all outside distractions and focusing on their tasks. Julien had to do that all year. “As a coach you’re going to be subject to criticism, but the most important thing is what’s going on inside that dressing room,” he remarked from the postgame podium (video) after Game 7 against Vancouver, his five-year-old daughter sitting next to him, a Stanley Cup Champions t-shirt in his hand. “There wasn’t a guy that didn’t believe in what we were doing. So it’s easy to stay the course, and you got to stay the course. Today you’re rewarded for it.”
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