Fedotenko Re-Signs With Penguins

Sorry I didn't get this up sooner boys and girls .... it was a holiday thing.

On Friday, the Pittsburgh Penguins re-signed key Stanley Cup contributing LW Ruslan Fedotenko to help them defend their title in the 2009/2010 season.

Despite receiving offers from several teams with more money and longer terms on the table, Fedotenko -- incredibly -- resigned with the Penguins for one year at 1.8 million dollars, which is even less than the 2.25 million he played for this past Cup winning season.

I was a bit surprised Fedotenko returned, given the other offers he was recieving, but not nearly as surprised as I was about the amount of money and term he did ink for.

Rusty deserves a lot of credit for wanting to come back to a Cup contender, and Pens' GM Ray Shero also deserves big kudos for bringing Feds back into the fold at that extraordinarily reasonable salary.

With #26 coming back to the big club next season, the Penguins will return 11 of 12 forwards who played for them in game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final, which is really an incredible circumstance given the dictates of free agency in the salary cap world.

Admittedly, they will have a little turnover on defense, but even then, it's hard for the Penguins to complain.

At this point, the Penguins are probably finished with the most significant aspects of free agency. They are just under 3 million beneath the salary cap ceiling and may very well bring in one more player or two (particularly on defense), but that isn't necessarily something that may occur in the next day or two, but perhaps later this summer as other, depth players throughout the league end up filling out remaining roster spots league wide.

Petr Sykora may be one of those players. The Penguins are also known to be talking to representatives of defenseman Nick Boynton and winger Ales Kotalik.

If there's another signing, I'll get word up here as soon as I hear. In the meantime, I hope in the next week or so to begin bridging the off-season by giving out my individual player grades for the 2008/2009 Stanley Cup Champions.

More soon.