On the Arizona Coyotes …
Craig Morgan of Arizona Sports: The Coyotes only have RFA Tobias Rieder left to sign. It’s sounding like their roster is set heading into training camp.
“At this point, I think it would be reasonable to suggest that would be the case,” Chayka said. “There is still some work to be done for certain teams in certain situations, but these things can take time and a lot of teams are content with where their roster is right now so my guess is this would be our team going into camp.”
The Coyotes were one of the teams that showed interest in signing Kris Versteeg to a PTO, but as of now, Versteeg is hoping to sign a regular contract.
Chris Nichols of Today’s Slapshot: Coyotes GM John Chayka was on TSN 1260 on Tuesday talking about the expansion draft that will happen in June. Chayka was saying that the Coyotes, and all other teams are running through mock drafts, looking at their own team, but also who might become available on the trade market.
“I think it is an ongoing process,” said Chayka while on Edmonton’s TSN 1260 Tuesday afternoon. “It certainly has impacts on your strategical decisions, and everyone is looking to try to find undervalued assets . There’s different mechanisms in the CBA to try to find those things; whether it is the salary cap constraint, whether maybe it’s a budgetary constraint for a team. The expansion draft is certainly one of those.
“The rules that were set forth by the league are certainly interesting. For us, where we’re at in our kind of life cycle of our team, we’ve got a lot of young players. A lot of young assets. And those are all thankfully expansion-protected. So for us, we’re able to kind of hopefully benefit from that. We’re able to keep our core group intact for sure.
The Coyotes will monitor other teams and look for ways to take advantage of other teams situations. The Coyotes won’t be the only team trying to do that.