FanPost

Ray Shero UFA History

With all the talk of trying to sign talented UFAs, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at Shero's history with signing UFAs. Using Capfriendly, here are all of his UFA signing from his time in Pittsburgh and New Jersey sorted by Cap Hit (be sure to change "signing status" to "UFA").

I'm going to narrow down the search for players that were signed from another team to at least three seasons and at least a 2M AAV with UFA status. Using three seasons and over 2M AAV is rather arbitrary, but I'm trying to weed out depth signing. One fault is that this doesn't really take into account the cap hit percentage at the time of the signing. For example, Sydor in 2007 at 2.5M AAV doesn't seem like much in 2019, but in 2007 that was 4.97% of the cap, which would be about 4.1M now.

Paul Martin 2010 - 5 years - 5M AAV

Zbynek Michalek 2010 - 5 years - 4M AAV

Rob Scuderi 2013 - 4 years - 3.375M AAV

Ben Lovejoy 2016 - 3 years - 2.667 AAV

That's a rather short list for a guy that spent 8 July 1st's in Pittsburgh and 4 July 1st's in New Jersey. There are a lot of potential reasons for this. The Devils haven't been good so it hasn't made sense to spend money on UFA's yet. Pittsburgh already had top end talent with Crosby, Malkin, Fleury, and Letang and were probably in a tight place capwise for many of those years. Nevertheless, I found it surprising how short this list was. It might also be an odd coincidence that they are all defensemen.

Paul Martin is probably the biggest success story there and when you consider he was signed at 8.42% of the cap in 2010, it was a pretty big signing for Shero. That would be almost a 7M AAV defenseman now. All three of the others eventually were traded. Michalek lasted two years in Pittsburgh and was eventually traded for a 3rd and some guys that never made it to the NHL. Scuderi lasted two and half years was then passed around to Chicago (33% retained), then to LA (50% retained) and played the last year of his contract in the AHL. We all know the story with Lovejoy.

This isn't to say Shero won't spend money. He spent big to extend Crosby, Malkin, Letang, He has given nice RFA contracts to Crosby, Malkin, Neal, Fleury, Palmieri, Larsson and Severson. However, it makes me wonder if Shero doesn't view UFAs from other teams as a good way to improve his team and therefore usually doesn't spend a lot on July 1st.

Will the summer of 2019 be different? Should fans lower their expectations for July 1st?

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