Kraken to let Morgan Geekie, Daniel Sprong test waters as NHL free agency opens
NHL free agency begins in earnest Saturday, but on Friday, the Kraken allowed forwards Morgan Geekie and Daniel Sprong to test those open waters by not making them qualifying offers.
Both players were pending restricted free agents (RFA) and the Kraken had until 2 p.m. on Friday to make the qualifying offers to retain control over the process. Instead, they only made offers to RFA candidates Vince Dunn, Will Borgen, Cale Fleury and minor-leaguer Kole Lind, leaving Geekie and Sprong unrestricted free agents (UFA) who can be signed by any team.
Allowing both to walk enables the Kraken to avoid arbitration with them and potentially losing the cases and having to pay out more than the team is willing to spend. A similar situation arose last summer when the Kraken let forwards Sprong and Ryan Donato go by not making RFA offers but eventually brought both back at more team-friendly amounts.
But there are no guarantees Geekie and Sprong won’t be snatched up elsewhere, with Geekie a developing young center and strong faceoff man while Sprong is coming off a highly productive 21-goal season as a fourth-liner.
The Kraken also announced Friday that AHL goalie Joey Daccord had been re-signed for two years at $1.2 million annually, allowing him to avoid free agency and compete for a backup role behind Philipp Grubauer. The contract is a one-way deal, meaning Daccord — who helped lead the Coachella Valley Firebirds within a victory of a Calder Cup title — gets paid the same regardless of whether in the minors or NHL.
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“Joey had an impressive season with the Coachella Valley Firebirds, playing a significant role in their Calder Cup Finals run, and contributed meaningful minutes with the Kraken,” Kraken general manager Ron Francis said in a release. “We are excited for him to remain with our organization.”
That deal and the RFA offers were just the start for a Kraken side with work ahead in re-signing top defenseman Dunn, preferably to a multiyear deal before he hits unrestricted free agency in 12 months. They also could be in for stiff negotiating with Borgen, who is coming off a solid season.
Indeed, the Kraken are expected to be focused more on keeping their own players this summer than going after others as energetically as a year ago.
Last year’s additions of Andre Burakovsky, Justin Schultz and Martin Jones on the day free agency opened, paired with Jaden Schwartz and Grubauer being signed in the early stages two summers ago, formed a key part of the team’s recent playoff season. But now, with the foundational core of the NHL roster established, the Kraken seem likely to wait out the early weeks of free agency and attempt instead to use salary-cap space later on to land somebody another team can’t afford.
“I don’t see us being as active in free agency as we were last year just based on where our roster is,” Francis said in an interview earlier this week. “But that doesn’t mean we’re not open to looking at things whether it’s free agency, trades, what have you to try to make our roster better. We’ll certainly explore all of those things.”
It was several weeks into free agency last year when Francis pried the contract of winger Oliver Bjorkstrand away from the Columbus Blue Jackets for a mere fourth-round draft pick. Francis should have a few million dollars’ worth of cap space to absorb another such costly player this season once he’s done dealing with his own pending free agents — Dunn being the biggest.
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Players gain RFA eligibility after three years and before their six-year UFA status is gained.
The players could balk at accepting Friday’s RFA offers and hope for a competing bid from another team — though this rarely happens — which the Kraken could then match to automatically keep them. All the Kraken’s remaining RFA players also have arbitration rights, as did Geekie and Sprong, and could exercise them within the next week and use the pending hearing and its uncertain outcome to leverage the Kraken for more money ahead of time.
Carson Soucy, Donato, Joonas Donskoi and Jones are the Kraken’s only UFA players and were not expected to be re-signed Friday, leaving them free to go elsewhere.
Francis also had until Friday to bolster his remaining cap space by $3 million through a buyout of goaltender Chris Driedger’s salary — something the GM said earlier this week he would not do.
Driedger hasn’t played for the Kraken since tearing his ACL during last summer’s IIHF World Hockey Championships and is owed $3.5 million this coming season, the final year on his contract. He and Daccord could compete for the Kraken backup role, with the loser going to Coachella Valley.
For now, the pending Dunn deal is the one to watch as the Kraken try to lock him up, likely to a seven- or eight-year term approaching $8 million annually. Kraken MVP Dunn had a breakout season, though prior inconsistencies could give pause about his contract length.
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Still, the team doesn’t have much choice, as Dunn could play on a one-year arbitration deal and then hit the open market a year from now in unrestricted form.
Following this week’s NHL draft, the Kraken are more loaded with forward prospects than defensemen and can’t really afford to lose a mid-20s defender such as Dunn entering his prime. It’s within the next three years that many Kraken prospects will be cracking the roster in larger numbers to replace expiring contracts of the current core and AHL rookie Ryker Evans for now is seemingly the team’s lone near-NHL-ready blue-line draftee.
Jamie Oleksiak and Adam Larsson will see contracts expire three years from now, while Schultz has one more season — leaving Dunn the team’s best-suited defender for a leading role in the future.
The team appears better stocked up front once initial Kraken expansion holdovers Jordan Eberle, Yanni Gourde, Alex Wennberg and Schwartz see their contracts expire in one to three years. They’ve already got Burakovsky, Bjorkstrand and Jared McCann under contract four more seasons, with former first-round picks Matty Beniers and Shane Wright under control for multiple years, plus this week’s first-rounder in winger Eduard Sale and a host of second- and third-round forwards as well.
For now, the Kraken will likely keep developing defenders Borgen and Fleury while waiting to see where others such as Evans, last summer’s second-rounder Ty Nelson and 2021 fourth-rounder Ville Ottavainen eventually fit. In other words, even if he pays blue line RFA candidates a little more than he wants in coming weeks, Francis isn’t really in as good a position to let those players walk as he is some of his forwards.
Source: The Seattle Times
