I'll Sign Anything You Want Me to Just Get Her Away From Me.

So much to talk about so little time.

We'll start with the Pens.

Mathieu Garon
Phillipe Boucher
Miroslav Satan
Hal Gill

All UFA's
All gone

Although I wouldn't mind Gill or Satan at significant pay cuts if our other FA's don't sign.

Chris Minard
Connor James
Janne Pesonen
Jeff Taffe
Bill Thomas

Who? Exactly

Paul Bissonnette
Ben Lovejoy
John Curry

All RFA's, all probably coming back

Which leaves us with the Hotlist as far as I'm concerned

Ruslan Fedotenko
Petr Sykora
Mike Zigomanis
and Rob Scuderi

Mike Zigomanis

Probably gone, this is pretty much a depth pipe dream for me. The guy won 65% of his faceoffs last year. I'd sign him in a heartbeat if you can get him around the veteran minimum, but maybe that's not possible. Count on him leaving, but remember that I said keep him.

Petr Sykora

I was ready for him to leave. I was. But then I started thinking about what was out there. And how much he did for us in two years. And how he was still relatively young. And how he was probably hurt at the end of the year. And that image of him talking to Flower in Game 5. And what was out there. And that he would probably take a pay cut to remain with the team. He's not our best option, but similar to how we took a risk when we first signed him, maybe we do it again for cheaper. If he returns to form this year we maximize our investment and he can get a decent payday next year. If Feds leaves and there's nothing else out there we bring him back. Speaking of...

Ruslan Fedotenko

Good riddance. Let the man get paid. There's a lot of good about him and he certainly was a big part of the cup win, but don't sign him to a multi-year contract that you know he deserves. Much like young love, let him go, if he comes back it was meant to be, if not we move on to some dude from Columbus.

and finally "The Piece"

Rob Scuderi

How you let a man with those thighs walk, I'll never know. But I think you have to. It's sad because before this season started I thought we could resign him for 3 or 4 years at between 1.5 and 2 million per. And then he went out and made a name for himself. The biggest problem is we can't do for him what we did for Orpik, give him more years to make up for that paycut, because we don't want a 35 year old Rob Scuderi taking up cap space, at least I don't. This isn't NHL '09, you have to let some people go for cap reasons and I think given our depth at the position, Gogo, Lovejoy, Sneep, and a host of other draft picks you let him leave and sign a cheaper, short-term replacement.


Next Up Who we will target on the open market.

-the legend