This doesn’t come as any kind of a great surprise, but the Lightning have agreed to a contract with defenseman Andrej Meszaros, whom the team acquired from Ottawa on Friday.

I don’t have all the particulars as of yet, but the deal is worth $24 million over six years, and the deal is backloaded with his salary for the 2008-09 season set at $2.5 million, which is the salary the Senators were offering him. Of course, the salary cap hit will average out to $4 million per season, which essentially is right about what the combined cap hit of Alex Picard and Filip Kuba would have been.

I’m going to give a call to Meszaros to get some of his thoughts on the subject. Look for that a little bit later at this web page and in Sunday’s newspaper.