Red Wings veteran defenseman officially announced his retirement today during an 11 AM ET press conference from the Joe Louis Arena.
Rafalski will leave 6 million dollars on the table with one year left in his contract. He says that a decision was made to retire two months ago after what he called the most challenging season in his 11 year career both mentally and physically. This is according to Ansar Khan of Mlive.com.
“Throughout the year being on the training table every day was getting tiresome,” Rafalski said. “It wasn’t as much fun coming to the rink because of that.
“I wasn’t able to skate the way I’d like to. It made me adjust how I approach playing the game.
“As far as the money goes, there’s more important things now.”
Rafalski went on to say that playing with the Wings was an opportunity of a lifetime…
“The style of play, the quality of players, the quality of the organization from top to bottom, it was a place that was high on my list,” Rafalski said. “When I heard they were interested I was very excited. It gave me a fresh, new start.
“I was able to talk to Pavel (Datsyuk) yesterday and told him it was great to come to work with these guys because it made coming to the rink fun every day. But right now it’s time to move on and start a new chapter.”
The Red Wings are hoping Lidstrom returns – he will decide before the entry draft on June 24-25 – and they now have the salary-cap space to pursue a premier free agent on July 1. So Rafalski knows he is not leaving the team in a bind.
“Nik Kronwall really stepped up this year, really improved his game throughout the playoffs,” Rafalski said. “This organization has never had a problem filling holes, finding players that fit what they want to do. I don’t have any worries about the future for this organization.”
So now you have two big questions going into this off-season. The first one being will Nicklas Lidstrom return for one more season with the team and the second being what do you do with the $6 million dollars saved from Rafalski’s contract? If you are the Red Wings do you save the money, do you spread the money out or do you go after one big catch?
Now the Red Wings don’t seem like a team that is going to save the money so I’m going to go ahead and eliminate that first option. So now that leaves either spreading the money around or going after one big free agent.
Something Ken Holland probably isn’t going to do is go after restricted free agents (RFA) this off-season. Khan writes that Ken Holland isn’t philosophically opposed to it, he just see’s it as a waste of time and cost prohibitive since the RFA’s original team can match any contract offer from another team. This means that the Wings may have to wait on RFA’s like Nashville’s Shea Weber, Los Angeles’ Drew Doughty, Atlanta’s Zach Bogosian and Phoenix’s Keith Yandle.
In terms of unrestricted free agents, Holland says there are some good names out there but not very many Rafalski’s.
Some of these names include Kevin Bieksa, Christian Ehrhoff and Sami Salo of Vancouver; James Wisniewski, Andrei Markov and Roman Hamrlik of Montreal; Ian White and Niclas Wallin of San Jose; Eric Brewer of Tampa Bay; Joni Pitkannen of Carolina; Tomas Kaberle of Boston; Ed Jovanovski of Phoenix; Scott Hannan of Washington and Bryan McCabe of the New York Rangers.
Next season the only players on defense that are certain to come back are Niklas Kronwall, Jakub Kindl and Brad Stuart. Ruslan Salie more than likely won’t be brought back and Khan states that the team will try to re-sign Jonathan Ericsson but will not overpay for him.
The Wings also may count on Brendan Smith to make the jump to the NHL or veteran Doug Janik to fill spots on the blue line.
Source: Mlive.com
