Washington Capitals: Top 3 needs heading into free agency

Defense

The Capitals have two UFAs and one RFA on the blue line this offseason. The unrestricted free agents are Brenden Dillon and Radko Gudas while the restricted free agent is Jonas Siegenthaler. I would be shocked if the team didn’t bring back Siegenthaler. I also wrote about how re-sigining Dillon should be a priority.

Siegenthaler carries a cap hit of $714,166. Dillon’s cap hit is $1,635,000 while Gudas carries a $2,345,000 cap hit after his trade last summer when they shipped Matt Niskanen to the Philadelphia Flyers.

There are several names out on the market that the Caps could look at if they’re unable to re-sign Dillon or Gudas. We’ve talked about how they should look into Chris Tanev, you can read more about that here.

There are other names out there too. Trevor Van Riemsdyk, Dylan Demelo, Dustin Byfuglien, Alex Pietrangelo, Justin Schultz, Tyson Barrie, Torey Krug, Andy Greene, Sami Vatanen among others.

We’ve talked about how the Caps should re-sign Brenden Dillon this offseason to help improve the defense. Adding a defenseman who’s proven is high on Washington’s shopping list.

That leaves us to one more need that we’ll address for free agency and this need is more clear than ever.