The NHL's Free Agency period opened up Saturday afternoon and Carolina wasted no time in making a splash, grabbing two of the biggest free agent targets in Dmitry Orlov and Michael Bunting.

The Hurricanes also re-signed netminders Frederik Andersen and Antti Raanta as well as forward Jesper Fast.

Later in the day, Canes general manager Don Waddell spoke with the media. Here's what he had to say:

On his overview of the day: Interesting day. Yesterday afternoon, my staff asked, 'What time should we come in tomorrow?’ and I said, ‘Oh, I don’t even know if you need to come in. It’s going to be a quiet day.’ That kind of proved to be a little different. Things have changed here. We used to chase players, have to overpay players, but we’ve now become a destination place. We’re getting those calls first as some teams do and it’s nice to be in that position to have an opportunity to make your team better. I’ve always said my job as the general manager is to make our team better if we can and we felt the additions today certainly put us in a different spot moving forward.

On adding Dmitry Orlov: Orlov’s a player that we’re very familiar with. Obviously he was in Washington for a long time and traded to Boston last year at the trade deadline. We think a puck-moving defenseman fits the style that Rod likes to play. He can join the rush and bring some offense on the power play. Our team, we spend less time in our zone than any other team in the NHL and so when you're talking about adding pieces to your hockey club, you want to talk about how can they make your team better and certainly we feel that with his abilities back there, he does that for us.

On what has made Carolina such a destination other than the winning: Well certainly it’s the culture that Rod’s built and winning comes into it, but I think more importantly, the fans have come back. This place, we’ve all experienced it in the last few years in the playoffs and this year. In the regular season, we had 33 sellouts. The playoffs, it’s a different mindset coming into this building not only as a player, but for our fans. Visiting players, coaches, and general managers have all told me it’s the loudest building in the league. It’s a great atmosphere. So it’s a combination of all those things. Great area to live in too. The Triangle area is a great living environment. We’ve got a lot of good things going for us.

On the rumored Tony DeAngelo trade and if adding Orlov changes things: Us and Philly have a deal in principle but it just can’t be executed till a certain date. We’re not sure yet though. As you add good pieces, you always ask how are you going to make it fit? We’ve got a lot going on this year with contracts and other things. Also potential other opportunities maybe for a trade still. The good thing is that it’s July 1. We’ve got some time to figure this out. Again, when you get presented with good players, it’s something I feel you have to do.

On how the process for re-signing Antti Raanta and Frederik Andersen went down: [Raanta] we’d been talking to. Met with his agent at the draft. Both guys expressed that they wanted to come back from the day that the season ended, but speaking about Rants, we met the agent and we kicked around multi-year deals, and ultimately he took a little salary cut which is always hard for a player to do. When he’s played he’s been really good, but he hasn’t played a lot of games and so we felt that if we’re going to go the route like we did last year - Kochetkov is real close and maybe ready to play right now - that we’ll probably be able to play all three goalies throughout the season. When you look at it like that, I ask, ‘What’s it going to cost me to carry all three goalies?’ Rants at $1.5 million, Kochetkov at $2 and Freddy at $3.4. There are a lot of starter’s in the league that make more than all three of those guys combined, so if we were going to bring him back, I felt that we needed the insurance to have all three of them back. We met with Raanta’s agent and finally last night, we talked for a little bit until I turned my phone off at 1 o’clock in the morning and got back at it today and by 10:30, we had that deal done. Freddy, we were in really good negotiations and we kind of cooled off. We were in a little bit of a stalemate and we stayed in touch with his agent throughout the process and today made a decision to take another strike at it. We knew Freddy really wanted to come back but we also knew that… again, he’s another guy we asked to take a pay cut. He had to think about it and he had a few weeks and today when I called Claude Lemieux, his representation, he called me back within five minutes and said, ‘Yeah, he’s on board.’ We’re very excited and happy to have those guys back.

On getting team friendly deals: We’ve gotten a few. If I look at Jordan Staal, our captain, the leader of our team, was coming off an AAV of $6 million and now going onto a $2.9 AAV. Certainly there’s been a few guys that have done that. Not every player looks at it the same way. Some guys, their mindset is just a little different and some guys’ careers are going in a different direction. Both of our goalies are getting up there along with Jordan. They’re not getting any younger so they realized where they are in their careers where some of the younger players are obviously going to look at it differently as they move forward with contracts.

On signing Michael Bunting: We’ve agreed to terms. We’ve got paperwork out for signature. We wanted to add to our forward group a player that brings lots of intangibles. Can score, hits, he’s a feisty guy. So assuming there’s no issue with our paperwork*, we’ll sign him to a three-year deal with an AAV of $4.5 million.

*The availability happened before Bunting was officially a Hurricane

On if there's any more splashy moves in the hopper: We don’t have too much cap space now. I think the big one for us was getting Orlov. I think he was ranked as the top defenseman on everybody’s lists as far as free agents and then adding a guy like Bunting, who was sought after, I think really adds to our group pretty well here right now. I think when I left the office we were talking about the cap and I think we’re at some place around $2.5-3 million left in our cap. We’re fortunate enough to have an owner that will spend as much money as we need to spend, but unfortunately the NHL tells us we can only spend so much. Cap went up $1 million this year and I think we’re hovering right around $80 million which is crazy because just before the day started I think we had $23-24 million of cap space. It goes quickly.

On if there's any concern with getting Pyotr Kochetkov playing time if he needs to get sent down to the AHL: If Pyotr’s gotta go down and play, I have a couple of options already. Obviously he’s not going to play every game, but if we get in a spot where the other two guys are playing well and healthy and we need to find Pyotr some games for a while, there’s not going to be a problem. You never know how things are going to go. It was very rare last year where we were all healthy at the same time. There might have been a few days here and there. Not worried about it at all, about non-affiliation as far as finding a place for Pyotr to play.

On the status of Sebastian Aho's contract extension: We’re talking. We’ve had great discussions actually. I met with the agent, Gerry Johansson, in Nashville for the draft and we said let’s get through the next few days. He had a lot of clients that were unrestricted free agents and obviously we were also pretty busy. I think in the next couple of days we’ll pick that back up and see if we can come to a final landing spot.

On if he feels the need to trade any of his current defenseman with signing Orlov and potentially adding DeAngelo: Like I said starting off, if we can make our team better, we’re going to find ways to do that. If you’re asking me about any particular position, I would say no. I think we’re pretty well covered right now. If we did move a defenseman and let’s say we wanted to make a play for another one, that’s still an option. We’re at a point though where we’re at a good spot. We don’t feel compelled to have to do anything else right now with the guys we signed today. Again, there’s a lot of moving pieces. There’s been very few trades. I think at the draft I heard the first round was the first time there had been no trades since 2007. There’s been very few players traded so far this summer and it’s because of the cap. Most teams don’t have the cap space. As we get through these few days and everything shakes out, I think you’re going to see some more movement around the league from players.

On re-signing Jesper Fast: Important player for us. He’s played alongside Jordan for the most part since he got here. He’s just a true pro. He comes to the rink everyday and you get the same effort in practice as you do in a game. That line I don’t think gets enough credit of how good they are. Fast, Staal and Martinook. If you look at their analytics as a line, they spend more time in the offensive zone for a third line - if you call them a third line, Roddy will call them your first line - than any other line in the league. They’re an important group here so bringing Jesper back, another guy that from day one kept saying he wanted to be here, we gave him a little raise and probably kept the term a little lower than he initially wanted, but if a player wants to come back and we want him back, we’re always going to find a way to keep him.

On if the team has been fielding calls on any of their players: We get calls all the time about some of our players. That’s a good thing. That means I’ve got players that people want. Nobody that everybody is targeting that I could say this guy, that guy. There’s been some rumors out there and that’s what they are, rumors. I don’t know where they all start. It’s our friends in the media. But you do get calls. People looking to try and do things. After we get through this period here in the next two or three days, I think you’re going to see some trades around the league to be sure.

On if he's kept up with the other moves around the league: To be honest, I’ve talked to very few GMs in the league today. A couple. I know I’ve got some missed calls that I’ve got to get back to, but it’s mostly all agents today. So other than when I asked my team down in my office, because I’m on the phone the whole time, what happened while I was gone, I haven’t even seen all the signings yet. I’ve heard some of them. That will be my night tonight at some point going through and seeing who got better. I don’t think there’s a lot of huge names. I think Orlov was a big name for us and there’s some other guys that moved around, but we’ll take a look later.

On the team utilizing their current cap space to land a player like Orlov at a higher AAV but for a lower term: That was our goal. If we get him here and everything goes well, there’s no reason we can’t extend him at that point. You can’t take your cap space with you. If you don’t spend it, you lose it and the cap’s only going to get tighter as you continue on so we wanted to leave ourselves with as much flexibility so that’s why we came up with this idea of going at him with a good number that we thought he’d accept and do it for a shorter term. It fits what we need and he was excited about it so it made sense to do it.

On if the team's moves today signal that they want to win now: We definitely want to win now, but the difference would be that we don’t want to mortgage the future to win now. Cap space is like gold. Last year, we were able to get Pacioretty, obviously he got injured, and Burns because we had cap space. Now, Orlov and Bunting, all they cost us was cap space. We didn’t have to give up any assets for them. But if you don’t have that cap space to get them, you can’t add the player. What we’ve done here is a really good job which a lot of really good credit goes to our staff. We’ve managed our cap space very well and they've put us in a position to be able to do the things that we’ve done on July 1 of each year.

On if the team targeted Bunting because of his grit and agitator tendencies: It’s certainly something that we wanted to look at to add, but most importantly we wanted to add good players because to win hockey games, unless the rules change this summer, you have to score more goals than the other team. So whenever you go out and especially in a case like this where you spend $13.5 million on a player, you want to make sure you get a player that can contribute offensively. He just has that extra knack the way he plays that was something we definitely wanted and that Rod wanted. So it was a bonus to be able to get that type of player.