Alex Semin has finally up and done it: he’s a Carolina Hurricane. I guess the Canes’ new motto is “if you can’t beat ‘em, sign ‘em.” Alternate joke: it won’t be the first time Semin has been mentioned in the context of a disaster.

It’s only 1-year, 7 mil, though, so it won’t be as devastating as a Floyd or Isabel.

Fun factoid c/o @dchesnokov:

The Canes is the team Semin scored the most points (and goals) against in his career – 45 (27+18) in 41 games for the Caps.

Which is not terribly surprising, considering the Capitals play the Hurricanes what seems like seventeen times a season. Frankly, those totals look pretty low. I couldn’t score 45 points in 41 games against the Hurricanes, but only because I’m a goalie.

On the other hand, this is making the Hurricanes look slightly fearsome. They’ve got Staal, Semin, the other Staal, Skinner, the other Staal (no, the other one), and screwing up my list, Cam Ward. I can definitely see them coming in second in the SE (which still may not be enough for a playoff berth, but we’re not SouthLeast for nothing).

Finally, as I’m sure you’re wondering, Alex isn’t set to be an Atlantic tropical cyclone name until 2016. But, as the first name on the list, we’ll definitely get one!

See what the competish has to say about this over at Eye on the Storm.

I feel like George McPhee must be stage-dooring the Caps the way he’s getting things signed lately.

First, he locked down Filip Forsberg, whom you might remember from the draft last month. He got the standard 3-year, entry-level contract, in which he receives a severe pay raise when being called up from the AHL. As it stands he is expected to play in Leksand next season anyway.

Then he signed some guy named Matt Clackson, whom I only heard of when trawling the news archives of capitals.nhl.com. Apparently he was 8th in the AHL in PIM last season, so I confidentally expect I will never mention him again.
» Continue reading “Capitals Re-Sign Mike Green, And Other News”

The Capitals have signed Wojtek Wolski to a 1 year, $600,000 deal, because apparently GMGM has started listening to me and is signing players based on how fun it will be to hear Locker try to say their name. Wolski is Polish (though he grew up in Toronto and in fact played against one of Bob McKenzie’s sons), and his name is pronounced “VOI-tek VOL-ski.” In the words of The Jam, that’s entertainment.

His career stats are 95-163-258 in 424 games, for a .608 PPG, though last year he went 4-8-12 in 31 while spending 6 games in the AHL. He scored the majority of his points in his 5 years with Colorado, before having 2 lackluster seasons where he bounced from Phoenix to the Rangers to Florida. His season highs are his first full season with the Avs (50) and his season split between the Avs and Coyotes (65). He went on to score 35 points… then 12.

That brings him to us. We got him heavily discounted (his last contract was 2 yr/$7.6 mil) and with low expectations. It looks like he’s had a monkey on his back for the last two years — resulting in his being scratched and therefore looking worse and worse. What could be the source of this scoring drought? Could he be, dare I say, enigmatic?

Wolski has been thrown around as a sort of replacement for Semin. Superficially it seems he’s not — for one thing, Semin has 408 points in a comparable number of games, as well as a $6 mil price tag — but at his very best, he could be compared with an average Sasha year (like the last two seasons). I don’t know what he needs to be great: his time with the Avalanche didn’t overlap with their awful dark years, but I’m not sure they had any spectacular talent, either.

The other best description of Wolski is as a gamble, but this isn’t perfect either. If he’s a gamble, he’s an extremely safe one. His upside is 65 points and his downside is 12, but at $600,000 if he doesn’t perform, we haven’t lost very much, and we can stash him in Hershey if things get too awful. Or maybe he’ll go absolutely bizonkers with Mojo and vindicate McPhee’s signing. According to Neil Greenberg:

For ‪#Caps‬ to get fair value for Wolski’s contract, he needs to put up 4G/5A/minus-2 in 36GP.

Which isn’t asking a whole lot. We play the Blue Jackets and the Oilers, right?

Wolski seems like he wants to turn over a new leaf, and the Caps are a pretty good team to do it with. For once he’s joined his new team at the beginning of a season, with a new coach, hoping to install a new style. He’ll be playing (or at least practicing) with an extremely high-caliber and, perhaps more importantly, offensively-oriented talent. Maybe that will be enough to kickstart his scoring touch.

(As always, numbers from CapGeek, NHL.com, or Hockey-Reference.)

There are two ways a general manager can approach Free Agent Frenzy:

1. They can sign marginal players for outrageous amounts and lengths in a desperate attempt to fix a problem that they know exists but can’t quite pin down (or as a bull-headed adherence to the particular ethos they have arbitrarily chosen to build the team around)

or

2. They can do nothing, which allows them to avoid making insane impulse buys just to prove that they’re doing something (as in option 1) but which will cause the fanbase to moan that they aren’t doing enough to improve the franchise (though that same fanbase will be moaning six months later when the reality of option 1 is apparent).

So what has GMGM done?
» Continue reading “Capitals Behave Cautiously During Free Agency”