Takin' a T/O With BT: The Bargain Basement Veterans of Free Agency

Have you ever been to a garage sale late in the day? Chances are the sale's been going for a few hours, all of the "quality" merchandise is gone, and the bargains have started coming out.

As you walk the driveway, you notice a box full of old records and start rummaging through it, hoping that you'll find that one treasure that no one else was able to find.
Whatever it is—be it Elvis, ABBA, the BeeGees, or Queen—the moment it hits your hands, you know you've found your diamond in the rough, and a record that would sell for some outrageous price on the open market out of a retail outlet is yours for fifty cents.

That's kind of what August is like for the NHL—by mid-July, a lot of the quality free agents are off the market, leaving teams to scrape around the bottom of the barrel, looking for players to fill out their roster and maybe find a quality character guy, or a player who could put up ten or fifteen goals.

So with August one day away, who are the best of the rest in NHL free agency this season? Well, the obvious answer is Brendan Shanahan, Teemu Selanne, and Mats Sundin. But obvious isn't fun, so get ready to dig a little deeper and journey through some of the veterans remaining on the NHL free agency list.

Remember, this isn't so much the "best of the rest" as it's...well...the rest:

Glen Murray and Mark Parrish

We're going to start the list off with recently bought-out forward Glen Murray―a former 30-goal scorer who became hindered by a defense-first system (and barring a waiver claim, Parrish will be bought out by Minnesota).

Teams may first shy away from Murray because of his age. At 35, the legs that propel that 6'3", 215-lb. frame will start to slow, and his hands may not be as soft as they used to be. His numbers from last year (17 goals, 13 assists in 63 games) may not do much to diffuse his downward trend.

But don't be fooled—Murray has proven to be one of the few big men that hasn't been hindered by the lockout and the infusion of free-range hockey.

Despite last season's less-than-stellar showing, Murray scored 24 and 28 goals in the years following the lockout. And if he had played in those extra 19 games he missed with a hip flexor injury last season, Murray could have easily broken the 20-goal barrier for the sixth straight year.

Thirty-five or not, a team in need of a big strong forward who has a nose for the net should eye up Murray, who was more of a cap casualty—making $4.15 million this season—than anything.

Speaking of cap casualties however, the Minnesota Wild seem to be ready to part ways with Mark Parrish, as they've waived the veteran forward who still has three years remaining on his contract.

At $2.65 million this season, a player of Parrish's potential offensive output seemed to be a bargain by today's standards, but the Wild didn't think so.

Since signing with the Wild, it seemed that Parrish had trouble finding the net—or that Jacques Lemaire had trouble getting his team out of the neutral zone—as Parrish had two consecutive years with less than 20 goals.

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