Connolly no game-changer, but he should help
For Tim Connolly to find success and happiness with the Maple Leafs, and for Leaf fans to find some level of satisfaction with Connolly they’ve been unable to find with other recent free agents, everyone is going to have to go into this new partnership with reasonable expectations.
Start with the fact that Connolly isn’t Brad Richards, and the Leafs, to their credit, aren’t pretending that the 30-year-old pivot was anything but Plan B.
Connolly’s unlikely to play anywhere near 82 games, and he’s not going to be making all-star teams or piling up 100-point seasons.
But in a position at which the Leafs remain thin, he can help.
And with a part of the game — the power play — desperately in need of fixing, he can help.
Finally, with three young centres, Tyler Bozak, Joe Colborne and Nazem Kadri, still very much in need of grooming, he can buy time.
The cost of this limited assistance, $9.5 million over two years, is significant, but not problematic at this time for a team that still has about $15 million in cap space. Ideally, the Leafs would have loved a nice, cheap deal, something like Washington got for the services of netminder Tomas Vokoun on Saturday.
But Vokoun didn’t have many options. Connolly, despite his injury-marred history, did, and that drove the price up.
While expensive, it’s a short-term deal that doesn’t entangle the club beyond the next collective bargaining agreement, which may prove to be important. We won’t know, of course, until Gary Bettman and Don Fehr fight it out, but the last lockout seemed to indicate that the teams that had the least commitments going into the work stoppage emerged in the best positions.