hey, UFA Day, what'll ya have, what'll ya have?

Pavel KUBINA (Czech Republic), originally uploaded by Patxi64.

it's UFA Day in the hockey world and that means that you shell out the $$$ for the players you want. if you're in Atlanta and you shell out the $$$, that's still not enough, as evidenced by last year's attempt at trying to secure Brian Campbell.

so what do the Atlanta Thrashers do knowing that they were hard-pressed to lure anyone over here? TRADE! and trade they did, adding a blueliner from Toronto by the name of Pavel Kubina. the move came @ a cost, however, w/ the departures of Garnet Exelby and Colin Stuart. we take away a nice, young PKer in the form of Stuart and a somewhat declining XLB and add a puck-mover that's, as a result, offensively-minded... like Kubina.

in all honesty, I'm saddened by the loss of those two players. XLB was certainly a fan fave in Atlanta and it will be interesting to see how he performs for the Toronto crazies. Stuart has nice potential to become more and more in the league, a la Marc Savard when he was w/ Calgary and the NYR's. who knows how he'll turn out in a few years, but he displayed a lot of promise whenever he was up in the NHL and playing.

but adding Kubina is a step in the right direction. granted, I'm not the IN DEPTH fan I might've been a few years ago, so w/ that said, I'm not too familiar w/ Kubina and his style of play... or his playing habits of the past few seasons. what I keep on hearing is how this move will pay off for Atlanta in the immediate future. hearing that Kubina has another year remaining on his contract, I'm wondering how that will play out in the coming days, up until the end of '09-'10 (if he isn't given an extension before then). I still have yet to see any sort of reaction on his end, so who's to say how Kubina feels about this deal.

while the Thrashers didn't add a single soul from the UFA marketplace, I still feel fairly positive about this first acquisition. there's still the rest of the summer to pluck out some UFAs and we'll see what happens w/ the field as it starts to dwindle. but I think that for once, this first step is the best first step the Thrashers organization has taken in the summer in quite some time.