Last summer, Devan Dubnyk's career was at an all-time low. He'd bounced from team to team, posting the worst numbers of his career, and he had gone from incumbent No. 1 NHL goalie to the minor leagues. His contract was up; his future was in doubt.
The Arizona Coyotes decided to take a chance. They signed him to a lowball contract, a one-year deal at $800,000, under a quarter of what he had made the year before.
It was a smashing success. The Coyotes flipped him to Minnesota in midseason for a draft pick thanks to some early success, and that's when Dubnyk really took off. At the end of the year, he received a significant number of votes for several major awards, even finishing ahead of Sidney Crosby in Hart Trophy voting for the NHL MVP.
His success is a good reminder that it sometimes pays to shop around in free agency.
With that in mind, we decided to look at some of the cheap free agents signed on July 1 to find the best bargains. "Cheap" for our purposes means an annual cap hit of no more than $2 million and a term of no more than two seasons. We looked for players who qualified as good bets, in other words capable not just o ...
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Article written by Jonathan Willis
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