DobberHockey.com posted a massive set of 21 fantasy hockey rambles, and, according to one Michael Clifford, the Red Wings’ key free agent signing was Andrew Copp, from both on-ice and fantasy hockey perspectives:
5. The biggest mover during Day 1 of Free Agent Frenzy had to be the Detroit Red Wings. They had over $30M in cap space entering the day and have a pretty clean cap sheet moving forward. It didn’t take them long to get busy as Andrew Copp‘s signing was announced almost immediately at 12:00 ET. Throughout the day, they added David Perron, Dominik Kubalik, Ben Chiarot, and Olli Mattta. In one day, GM Steve Yzerman quite literally added an entire forward line and a defense pair. I would quibble with some of the values – I do not think Chiarot is worth $4.75M for four years – but this was a team desperate for depth and added a lot of quality.
Adding Copp as the second-line center is the biggest note here. Since the retirement of Henrik Zetterberg, this team has not had a competent center to play behind Dylan Larkin; certainly not one that can play 18-19 minutes a night with good offensive contributions and penalty killing ability. With Perron added and the skill that already exists, Copp’s raw points upside is capped because of lack of power-play exposure. All the same, this was a big need for them and Copp should fare well there.
The additional scoring is important for them, but who does it help in fantasy? Well, the goalies, for starters (zing!). Whether the team improved defensively, well, we’ll get to that in a second. But the ability to score more goals throughout the lineup will only help the goalies rack up wins. If Larkin/Bertuzzi had an off-night, and the goalies weren’t stellar, they weren’t winning games. Having secondary scoring to pick up the top guns will help the goalies in that vital Win column. (This isn’t an exaggeration, either – Alex Nedeljkovic had 18 games where he allowed at least four goals and lost all of them. Jack Campbell won over 20% of his games where he allowed at least four. A team being able to score helps the goalie’s wins stats.)
More than that, it’s improvements to the power play that should help the skaters, fantasy-wise. Larkin had just 13 PPPs (!) in 71 games despite being featured on the top unit all season. Detroit had one of the worst power plays in the league, and as I mentioned in my write-up on Perron, they added one of the top wingers in hockey when it comes to goal-driving with the man advantage. Larkin was just a couple points shy of being a point-per-game player in 2021-22. Any bets he can be a point-per-game guy if that top PP unit improves to even just league average? (july14)
Continued; yes, Copp can be that valuable going forward. It’s not about scoring points (per se) for Copp–filling in that 2nd line, 2-way yeoman center’s role frees up Larkin, it frees up the 3rd line to generate more offense, and it allows the 4th line (which will likely be centered by Michael Rasmussen) to take some chances from time to time.
The Red Wings needed depth, depth, depth and more depth during free agency, and Copp may indeed be “the guy that pushes them over the top” in terms of possessing real depth up the middle of the ice.
