First UFA Top 10 'Big Board' for This Summer Revealed

Tampa Bay Lightning defenseman Darren Raddysh

July 1st won't be quite the same as in past years in the NHL. The so-called 'Free Agent Frenzy' will be more like a 'Free Agent Fizzle' this time around.

All the big names who were pending UFAs this past season have re-signed with their current teams. Huge stars like Connor McDavid to Kirill Kaprizov to Jack Eichel to Adrian Kempe and Artemi Panarin.

There will still be some talent out there, to be sure, just nothing game-changing. And we must also keep in mind that some might still be locked up by their incumbent teams before July 1.

All that being said, however, let's take a look at the Top 10 of the first UFA Big Board, as revealed by Chris Johnston in The Athletic:

Darren Raddysh
Rasmus Andersson
Alex Tuch
John Carlson
Sergei Bobrovsky
Evgeni Malkin
Charlie Coyle
Bobby McMann
Stuart Skinner
Jacob Trouba

A few things come to mind when glancing at this list (the order was Johnston's, by the way, not NHLTR's. We might have had Coyle higher, and have Mason Marchment in the Top 10, perhaps instead of Skinner).

The fact that three of the players in the Top 10 are 36, 37 and 39 years old tells you all you need to know about the depth of this year's pool. For those three players, this would almost certainly be their last contract.

Additionally, as mentioned above, it's quite possible that the top three on this list will be re-signed by their current teams, in particular Tuch and Andersson.

As for McMann and Skinner, you could have gotten pretty long odds before the season betting on either of those two names being on anyone's top 10 UFA list this summer.

And with a huge bump to a $104 million salary cap for teams for 2026-27, pretty much all of the names on this list are likely to pull in a much larger payday than they could have imagined before the season began.

It's still possible that Tuch, Andersson, Carlson and Trouba could boost their stock even further, depending on how they and their teams do in the remainder of the ongoing Stanley Cup Playoffs.

Honorable mentions, appearing later on Johnston's Top 20 list, include the aforementioned Marchment, Anthony Mantha, Jaden Schwartz, Viktor Arvidsson, and even the sizzling red-hot Frederik Andersen, with his ridiculous .957 save percentage and 1.02 goals against average through seven straight wins for Carolina thus far in these playoffs.