Update [7:30pm]:
Brendan Perlini, Madison Bowey, Christoffer Ehn not qualified by Red Wings. All become UFAs.
— Greg Wyshynski (@wyshynski) October 7, 2020
Based on the comments that have been made here so far, this won’t shock or particularly bum out many Wings fans.
Perlini was acquired at the end of October last year for Alec Regula as a “change of scenery” move. Perlini put up four points in 39 games. He was snakebitten for part of that but never overly impressive on a bad team. His qualifying offer would have had to have been for 105% of his 2019 salary of $874,125.
Ehn was a 2014 fourth round pick by Detroit who by age 24 had played in 114 NHL games and put up 13 points. He was a defensive-minded center in the mold of Joakim Andersson or Cory Emmerton, names you’ll notice are also no longer in the NHL. I anticipate Ehn will have the same path going forward.
While the 2020 draft drags on in a week very full of hockey before we wait to get clarity on how the rest of the year will go in preparing for the next season, we get some non-draft news about the Wings and their RFA situation:
DET does not qualify Madison Bowey.
— Elliotte Friedman (@FriedgeHNIC) October 7, 2020
The deadline for Qualifying Offers passed at 5pm today. In order to qualify Bowey, the Red Wings would have been required to offer him at least a one year deal worth $1M (no less than his current salary). He would not have been required to have signed it for the Wings to retain his RFA rights, but he could have. Without this Qualifying Offer, Bowey will become an unrestricted free agent when NHL free agency opens this Friday.
Bowey was acquired by Detroit in February 2019 along with one of the 2020 2nd rounders they used today in return for Nick Jensen and a 2019 5th. He played 60 games for the Wings, putting up 21 points, 42 penalty minutes, and a -20 rating. He was Detroit’s 2nd-leading scorer among defensemen in 2019-20.
With Bowey hitting RFA, the Wings currently have five NHL defensemen on their roster: Marc Staal, Danny DeKeyser, Patrik Nemeth, Alex Biega, and Filip Hronek. In addition, they also have Moritz Seider, Dennis Cholowski, Albert Johansson, Gustav Lindstrom, Jared McIsaac, Joe Hicketts, Dylan McIlrath, and Brian Lashoff currently signed.
We anticipate that the Red Wings will be looking for veteran defensive help for the upcoming season but it was clear that Bowey, 25, was not going to be part of the Red Wings’ future and would have still been just as much of a project as several much younger players with higher potential upside.
As of this posting, we haven’t seen confirmation that the remaining RFAs have been qualified, but the lack of information about anybody else becoming a UFA leads to an easy assumption that the remaining unsigned RFAs were at least given those offers. Here’s that list:
- Adam Erne
- Tyler Bertuzzi
- Anthony Mantha
- Dmytro Timashov
- Taro Hirose
- Kyle Wood/
