NHL Network: Elliotte Friedman on NHL Tonight when asked about where things will start for the Carolina Hurricanes.
** NHLRumors.com transcription
E.J. Hradek: “I want to go kind of around the league with you. You’re always focused on all the different stories. Let me ask you about Carolina because, you know, Donnie Waddell leaves. They have all this internal discussion about what they’re going to do. It looks like Eric Tulsky is going to have a lot more to do with everything.
Now he’s already had a lot to do with it to begin with, but you know, where is job one for the Panthers right now, excuse me, for the Hurricanes because there’s been all these guys that are free agents, some that are maybe to free agency in the future, where do you think it starts?”
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Friedman: “Well, I think it’s gonna start with Jaccob Slavin. And Jaccob Slavin has one more year of his contract, and a couple of weeks ago, when they got knocked out of the playoffs, you know, we were doing all these post mortems and talking about, you know, who’s coming and who’s going and all the free agents this year.
And someone called me and they said, You are not looking at the right guy. He says, I guarantee you the first thing that Hurricanes will get done, is they will take care of Slavin. Because he’s, they consider him the best defenseman, one of their top players, a Cornerstone player, and he’s got one more year to UFA
And I am under the impression they cannot sign an extension with him to July 1st, but I reported it it’s going to happen. They are going to extend Slavin. They are going to get something done with him. So it’s not necessarily a job for this year, but it is looking at their cap down the future. They’re gonna take care of him.
Now the other things they have to do, there’s varying degrees of confidence on players like (Brett) Pesce and (Brady) Skjei. But I think the other one is going to be (Martin) Necas.
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I think Carolina did have a plan that if they didn’t like what they saw there that they could bring Necas back. Necas hasn’t said anything publicly, but the word around the league coming out of the combine is, he doesn’t want to go back. And so I think Carolina is telling teams okay, we’re prepared to do this, but we consider Necas as a star. They believe that outside of Brind’amour system, he will take off and they are talking about a return accordingly. They expect star power in return.