PTO Season Is Here: Evander Kane Headlines the NHL Free Agents Still Without a Contract

The NHL's free agent market has effectively emptied. The salary cap jumped from $95.5 million to $104 million for 2026-27, which gave general managers more room than they have had in years, and most of it was spent in the first week of July. What remains is a group of veterans without contracts as August begins, and the list is longer and more recognizable than usual.

Evander Kane, Reilly Smith, Calle Jarnkrok, Jesse Puljujarvi, Matt Grzelcyk, Mike Reilly, Jeff Petry, Pavol Regenda and Philipp Kurashev are all still on the board. Patrik Laine remains unsigned as well, with the Islanders reportedly willing to offer only a tryout.

For fantasy managers, the leftover market is not a curiosity. It is where the last genuinely undervalued names get placed, and where a handful of them will land in situations that make them draftable.

Why the market stalled

Three things happened at once. The cap rose, teams spent aggressively on the top of the market in the opening days, and the restricted free agent class consumed more money and more cap flexibility than expected. Macklin Celebrini's five-year, $94 million extension in San Jose and the offer sheet activity around the league tied up space that would ordinarily have gone to mid-tier veterans in late July.

The result is a familiar August pattern: capable NHL players with no room left to sign them, waiting for training camp invitations rather than contracts. Professional tryout agreements are how this resolves. A player signs a tryout, attends camp, and earns a contract if he performs or if someone ahead of him gets hurt.

Evander Kane is the name that matters

Kane has been on the open market since July 1 after finishing the four-year, $20.5 million contract he originally signed in Edmonton. He spent last season in Vancouver, where he struggled to find consistency and finished with 13 goals and 31 points in 71 games.

That production is the problem and the opportunity in the same line. Thirty-one points from a bottom-six role is not fantasy relevant. Thirty-one points from a player who has repeatedly produced far more when placed alongside skilled linemates is a different proposition entirely, and Kane's history includes stretches of genuine goal-scoring production when the deployment was right.

Reports have consistently linked Edmonton back to Kane as a training camp option. That is the destination that would change his fantasy outlook the most, because a physical winger who can finish, playing anywhere near McDavid or Draisaitl, has a scoring ceiling that has nothing to do with what he did in Vancouver.

There is also a real possibility that he ends up on a tryout rather than a contract, and a further possibility that his career ends without another NHL deal. Both outcomes are on the table.

The rest of the board

Reilly Smith is the most reliable remaining forward, a veteran who has produced consistent secondary scoring across several situations. He is the sort of signing that helps an NHL team more than a fantasy roster.

Jesse Puljujarvi and Philipp Kurashev are the lottery tickets. Both are young enough to still have a version of their career ahead of them and have produced enough in flashes to justify a camp invitation. Neither should be drafted, and either could become a waiver add by November.

Jeff Petry, Matt Grzelcyk and Mike Reilly represent the defensive depth market. Grzelcyk is the interesting one for fantasy purposes because his production has historically been tied to power play deployment, and a defenseman who lands on a second unit somewhere is worth watching in deep leagues.

Patrik Laine is the highest-variance name on the entire list. A power play sniper whose only reported offer is a tryout is either the best value in the league or a player whose career has run out, and there is very little middle ground.

Fantasy fallout

The practical guidance is to draft none of them and watch all of them.

The August free agent market resolves in September, not August. Players sign tryouts when camps open, earn contracts in the preseason, and get line assignments in the final week before opening night. That timeline sits after most fantasy drafts, which is exactly why these players are free.

The players to prioritize once assignments are known are the ones who land on a power play unit. Power play time is the single largest driver of fantasy scoring for forwards outside the elite tier, and a veteran signed to a low-cost deal who ends up on a second unit will outproduce a dozen players who were drafted ahead of him.

Kane in Edmonton, specifically, would be a top waiver priority in every format. Kane anywhere else would be a deep-league watch.

The Verdexed model take

Verdexed's projection engine treats unsigned free agents as a distribution across landing spots rather than assigning a single team, and the resulting outputs are unusually wide for this group because the difference between a top-six role on a contender and a tryout that does not convert is the difference between fantasy relevance and zero.

The model's read on Kane places most of the probability mass on outcomes that are not fantasy relevant, with a small but meaningful tail in which he lands in a scoring role and produces at a rate that would have justified a mid-round pick. That shape, low median and a fat upside tail, is the textbook profile for a waiver-wire target rather than a draft pick.

The broader structural insight the model applies to August signings is worth stating: players who sign after camps open are systematically undervalued by fantasy drafters, not because the market misjudges their talent but because drafts happen before the information exists. That is not an inefficiency to be corrected. It is an opportunity to be exploited by whoever is paying attention in the last week of September.

What's next

Training camps open in September ahead of an opening night on September 29, the earliest in league history. Tryout agreements will be announced in the days before camps begin, and the useful signal will be which teams hand out invitations rather than which players accept them.

Watch Edmonton. Watch the Islanders, who have been linked to Laine on a tryout basis. And keep a list, because the players on it will be free in your league in October and expensive in November.