NHL free agency is underway. Unrestricted free agents from east to west and points unknown are putting their names on the dotted lines for various teams.

One of the biggest fish out there to be snared – former Dallas forward Brad Richards.

The guy has been linked to more teams than former big-league pitcher Mike Morgan, who pitched for 12 teams in a career that seemed to last longer than the Holy Roman Empire did.

One of the teams said to be seeking Richards’ service is the Buffalo Sabres. The team’s owner has two teenaged daughters, one of whom set the city off by tweeting (what else), “So no Richards.”

Town goes ballistic, thinking they’ve missed out on the high-scoring centerman. Radio phone lines lit up because the owner’s daughter took to the Twitter airwaves. We’re talking big-time crisis in Buffalo.

Shortly thereafter, the post is deleted and the 16-year-old puts out another tweet, claiming the previous tweet regarding Richards was, in fact, a “butt-tweet.”

Upon hearing this story from Boise’s resident Sabres expert, Steelheads account executive Mike Brady, my first thought was, “her butt has phenomenal typing skills.” Not a single typo from that posterior. Could your butt do the same?

The ECHL has also started moving into free-agent phase, with a couple of players already signing for teams in the east and, Friday, the league announcing each team’s qualifying offers.

Maybe we can get this girl to butt-tweet “So no McKnight” to see if we can get the same reaction in Boise.

Head coach Hardy Sauter made qualifying offers to seven players – essentially retaining their ECHL rights for the upcoming season: forwards Kael Mouillierat and Geoff Irwin along with defensemen Chris Hepp, Cody Lampl, Matt Case, Steve Oleksy, and Dustin Friesen.

Don’t read too much into who is and isn’t qualified. For instance, former head coach Derek Laxdal extended a qualifying offer to forward Ashton Rome last summer, knowing full well Rome had already signed a contract with an American Hockey League team. Yet he didn’t qualify the organization’s all-time scoring leader, Marty Flichel.

Reasoning is simple: Laxdal knew that Flichel, should he opt to play in the ECHL (which he did), would sign with the Steelheads, so he didn’t spend a qualifying offer. However, the coach wanted to protect Rome’s rights in case the AHL deal didn’t work out. The Steelheads would have had first crack at Rome at the ECHL level – to either bring him back to Boise or to swap those rights to another team.

So, while it is interesting to note that Sauter used five of his seven qualifying contract offers on defensemen, I advise you against over-thinking which players were and weren’t qualified. Sure, he’d like these seven guys on the team again next season. He sees a value in them as players. That’s why he gave them qualifying offers. But that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t value others who wore the Idaho sweater this past season.

For Sauter, now the fun really begins. He’ll work with the players that he offered qualifying contracts to, talk to other ECHL players who weren’t qualified by their respective teams, and search the hockey world for fresh faces to fill out his training camp roster. It’s hard to get more than three minutes of his time before his cell phone rings as interest in playing in Boise remains high.

If you haven’t been, it’s time to start checking IdahoSteelheads.com on a regular basis again as player signings start to leak out.

One I can assure you we won’t be announcing – Brad Richards. We couldn’t fit him under the ECHL salary cap. Well, not unless we wanted to have a one-man roster. Odds are stacked against a team that plays one-on-twenty every night.

One more assurance before I sign off – exactly zero percent of this post was butt-blogged. Rest easy, Steelhead fans, and start getting pumped up. October isn’t that far away.