Trevor Daley
This one is a tough one. Trevor Daley has been a good defenseman pretty much his whole career. He’s been in the league for twelve seasons, despite what some fans might say, you have to be somewhat good to last twelve years in the top league in the world.
The tough part of this is he is 36-years-old, had some injury issues and has been playing on the Detroit Red Wings teams of the last three years. Those teams have just been horribad. So bad that I just had to use a non word like that.
How much talent and juice is there available for this guy? With questions like that he should easily be affordable. His current cap hit is $3.166m, that will go down, and if Daley wants to return to a winning side it will most likely have to go down.
Again, they just need him to play bottom pairing minutes, they don’t need him for anything serious which is what they were asking in Detroit. At least when you look at the depth chart or the lineups Daley was playing on the first pair.
Daley’s stats have never looked too great, he is usually on the wrong side of fifty percent in his stats, but for bottom pairing guys I think he’d be fine. When he played on good Penguins teams in back to back Cup years he had OK or good stats. His best year being in 2015-16 where he played in 53 games for Pittsburgh. His Corsi was 53.55%, his scoring chance percentage was 56.79% and his high danger percentage was 55.77%.
That was five years ago. So the “does he still have it” question remains. But he could be cheaper, and playing on a good team he could really bring his stats up. He maybe wouldn’t be my first defenseman option, but an option he is I believe.