No matter the year, we tend to have a good sense of where the top free agents are likely to go. At the very least, we can easily predict potential suitors based on their contention situation and the teams with available cap space.
Go a few rungs down the ladder and it’s anyone’s guess where some of the lower-level free agents will sign. They’re not unwanted commodities. They can actually wind up being important pieces to any team’s puzzle. But the type of deals they command are far less financially imposing — more MLE than max deal — allowing more teams to throw the name in the hat for their services.