The Colorado Avalanche took care of one of their own pending free agents on Tuesday, signing restricted free agent Casey Mittelstadt to a 3-year, $5.75 AAV contract. Given that Mittelstadt was a restricted free agent, another team would have had to sign him to an offer sheet that gave the Avalanche a week to match. That’s no longer the case.
Usually with restricted free agents, they end up sticking around, given that they don’t have a ton of leverage. The Avalanche took care of this signing very fast, as the Stanley Cup Final just came to an end on Monday night. General Manager Chris MacFarland is not messing around. The Avalanche have a busy—and stressful—offseason ahead of them and getting this out of the way is huge.
The Avalanche still have to figure some things out with their salary cap and roster, because at this point in time, they would be unable to bring back both Gabriel Landeskog and Valeri Nichushkin. Landeskog counts for $7 million against the cap, while Nichushkin’s number is $6.125 million.
The Avalanche have $11.36 million of cap space right now according to PuckPedia, so having those two players on the roster with those numbers is just not an option.
It’s hard to speculate what the team will do with these two players, but one thing to note is that Nichushkin won’t count against the salary cap until November. Plenty of things could go down from now until then.
Locking up their own players seems to be the way to go this year given the unfortunate circumstances. They still have to figure out a number to sign Jonathan Drouin at, which alone will eat up a good chunk of money.
I think that the team will probably know some things about Landeskog and Nichushkin before anybody else (the public eye), so any moves that they make from here on out could indicate what happens with the two players in question for the start of the season.