The free agent market opens Tuesday at noon, and the Thrashers are looking to buy. They don't really have much choice.

They've got a lot of spots to fill, for one thing. Six players on the current roster become unrestricted free agents today, and the team on Monday bought out the contract of another, defenseman Alexei Zhitnik.

The Thrashers have a lot of money to spend, too. The NHL announced last week the minimum payroll for the 2008-09 season is $40.7 million.

"We're probably around $33 million-and-change committed," Thrashers general manager Don Waddell said Monday.

Included in Waddell's figure was the 2008-09 salary of goalie Kari Lehtonen, who will get a raise from the $2.2 million he made last season. He is a restricted free agent, meaning the Thrashers have the right to keep him by matching any other team's bid.

Counting Lehtonen, the team has 16 NHL roster holdovers. Waddell plans to add one to three players via free agency and the rest through trades or promotion of prospects in the organization.

Any free agent signees will be forwards who could play on one of the top two lines or defensemen who would rank among the team's top four, he said.

"The players that we sign have to be difference-makers," he said.

His first priority? A veteran defenseman. The Thrashers ranked worst in the league last season in shots allowed and tied for worst in goals allowed. But the team won't necessarily go after a stay-at-home defenseman.

"You can argue both sides of that," Waddell said, adding that an offensive defenseman can help prevent shots by helping keep the puck in the other team's zone.

The Ottawa Sun reported the Thrashers want former San Jose Sharks player Brian Campbell and could offer the 29-year-old offensive defenseman more than $7 million.

Waddell laughed when asked about that, saying he couldn't discuss individual players and "I haven't told anybody what we're going to spend."

In addition to a top defenseman, the Thrashers need some scoring help for Ilya Kovalchuk, who scored twice as many goals as any of his teammates (three times as many if you go by the Marian Hossa-less roster from the end of the season).

The Thrashers opened the 2007-08 season with a payroll of about $44 million, including the $7 million salary Hossa took to Pittsburgh late in the season.

Waddell wouldn't discuss how much the Thrashers' owners will authorize him to spend in 2008-09. He has one advantage he lacked last summer; a contract of more than four years no longer takes unanimous agreement of the owners. That court order, part of the Atlanta Spirit Group lawsuit, got overturned.

Buying out Zhitnik costs the Thrashers two-thirds of the $3.5 million he was to make next season, but that hit is spread over two years, at about $1.1 million per.

Other teams had been interested in accepting Zhitnik in a trade, Waddell said, but only if the Thrashers accepted an overpaid, underperforming player in return.

Coach John Anderson, in his second week on the job, said he'll have little input in free agent decisions.

"My opinion might weigh 2 percent, and our scouting staff and Don's opinion might weigh 98 percent," Anderson said, adding that he was so busy coaching the AHL's Chicago Wolves he didn't get a chance to see a lot of NHL games and evaluate potential free agent acquisitions. "It's like going to vote and not knowing who the candidates are," he said.