Penguins may have found a free agency steal in Blake Comea

Every year in free agency teams spend big money on players that never come close to giving them a solid return on that investment. Sometimes it's because a player ends up hitting the market at his highest point and is able to cash in on a career year in a very limited market.Sometimes teams just make bad decisions.Building a team through free agency can be a risky path to take because in a lot of cases you are paying top dollar for a player that has already played his best hockey for somebody else. The teams that tend to have the most succe s in free agency are the ones that already have their core players in place and simply need to fill in around the edges.One of the best ways to do that is to buy low on a bounceback candidate that other teams are overlooking for any number of reasons.One good example this season might be 's current resurgence with the where he is currently playing on a one-year, $700,000 contract. Following his hat trick in Wednesday's 4-3 overtime win against the , where he scored the game-winning goal in overtime, Comeau is already up to eight goals in 20 games this season. That is more than he scored in each of the past three full seasons split between the Calgary Flames and Columbus Blue Jackets. So how has it been working out so well for him in Pittsburgh?For one, Pittsburgh's already thin of group of wingers has been hit hard by injuries to and . Their absence has given Comeau an opportunity to play with Pittsburgh's top two centers, and , at various times in more of an offensive role than he's been used to in recent seasons.He is also the type of free agent that a team should be willing to roll the dice on, and really, that's what this is all about. It's not nece sarily about Comeau specifically. It's about what to look for in free agency and the type of player that can Jim Rice Jersey give you a big reward for a small price.When teams make roster decisions they often times seem to make them more based on previous results as opposed to what might happen in the future. Talented players going through a cold streak driven by an unusually low shooting percentage will get scratched because they aren't contributing enough. Players that do a lot of little things well but for whatever reason don't score or are hurt by the team around tend or the role they have been placed in to get overlooked. Teams have given up on useful players way too soon because their production dropped for any number of reasons even though they were still doing a lot of things below the surface that helped their team. (Alex Steen, Ju si Jokinen, and 2013-14 Conn Smythe Trophy winner Justin Williams all come to mind). When it comes to Comeau, he had some offensive succe s in the past and even scored 41 goals over a two-year stretch with the a few years back, including a 24-goal season in 2009-10. But lately, as his role has become more of a bottom-six, defensive forward that's been asked to be more of a grinder than a scorer, his offensive production completely dried up.But when you look below the traditional box score stats you start see a player that has provided some value that should have maybe been a little more sought after on the open market.Over the past three years he has consistently broken even from a po se sion standpoint despite some le s-than-favorable usage. When he is on the ice, the puck is generally moving in the right direction and his team tends to outshoot its opponents even though he is mainly used in a defensive role. But because he was only scoring on about five percent of shots, well below his career average, and spent a lot of time over the years on teams with some really bad goaltending (specifically in New York and Calgary) his personal numbers took a beating. And once that happens, what is there to like about a guy that has 14 goals and is a minus-17 in 177 games over three years?But those numbers are only a part of it. They are a record of what he or more accurately, what happened when he was on the ice They do not really tell you what he might do in the future.Once you dig below the surface you see that he was still averaging more than seven shots on goal per 60 minutes of 5-on-5 ice time, a number that placed him in the top half of the league among forwards, as well as his 50.7 percent Corsi Percentage (percentage of total shot attempts that belonged to his team). Those are very solid numbers, and when combined with his almost unbelievably low shooting percentage, he should have been a perfect player for a cap-strapped team (or any team, really) to take a shot on to add some depth. The thing about shooting percentages in the NHL is that they fluctuate and regre s from year to year, and even from week to week and month to month during a season. Players that are unusually above or below their career numbers tend to eventually get back closer to their normal levels because eventually some of those shots you're mi sing on are going to find the back of the net. And some of those good bounces that you were getting are going to dry up.Right now for Pittsburgh, Comeau is getting some of the breaks he wasn't getting over the past couple of years, scoring from some weird angles and on some chaotic scrambles in front of the net. Eventually that too will dry up for him, and sometimes the puck won't drop perfectly on his stick in the right spot and sometimes a wraparound from below the goal line won't bounce off of a defender and go in the net. But the Penguins are all about shot volume under first-year coach Mike Johnston. He wants his players getting the puck to the net and he wants his team to be a 35-shot per game team because that is a huge part of scoring goals. No goalie stops every shot he faces, and the more you make him work, the more chance there is for a deflection, or a rebound, or the goalie simply misplaying the puck.He won't keep scoring on 22 percent of his shots like he currently is this season, and at some point the Penguins are going to make a trade that is going to push him down in the lineup. But he is still going to give them a versatile player that can help give them of the depth they've lacked for a couple of years now when they were running the likes of Tanner Gla s and Joe Vitale out on their third-and fourth-lines and getting absolutely crushed when they were on the ice. And for a team like Pittsburgh that already has its core players in place, there is no better use of their free agency dollars. Triston Casas Jersey