Red Wings ready to sign Daniel Alfredsson, don’t expect full season
Daniel Alfredsson left the Ottawa Senators for the Detroit Red Wings last summer because of money a burning hatred of Eugene Melnyk his belief that they could bring him his first Stanley Cup championship.
While they only fell 15 wins shy of that goal, Alfredsson had a successful season: a team-high 49 points in 68 games, with 18 goals, at 41 years old.
He’s an unrestricted free agent at the moment, but Red Wings GM Ken Holland tells MLive.com that he expects to tender a contract to the veteran winger for the 2014-15 season.
"Certainly, I don't look at Alfie thinking he's going to play 82 games," Holland said told Ansar Khan. "When you got (Gustav) Nyquist and (Tomas) Tatar and (Tomas) Jurco and (Luke) Glendening and (Riley) Sheahan, if we can get a certain amount of games out of (Alfredsson), we would feel like he would be a real positive addition.
"But at the end of the day I think he wants to (skate) and we want to see him skate every day for 2-3 weeks and then let's see how he feels."
Either Holland is trying to temper expectations or he’s the worst pitchman since Lou Avery.
That assessment aside, Alfredsson makes the Wings a better team. His 18 power-play points aren’t too shabby, and it's not a terrible idea to have another elder statesman for that collection of young Wings forwards to admire.
The Wings have just over $5.2 million in cap space with Danny DeKeyser still to sign. But fear not: Alfredsson can simply do what every ancient NHL star does and sign a bonus-incentive contract. His last one, for example, had a base salary of $3.5 million with $2 million in bonus money.
