In his tenure so far as general manager, Ron Francis has made his strategy for team building clear. He very obviously prefers a draft-and-develop model for finding his core players with low-risk, medium-reward trades to find role players.
There’s good reason he’s avoided the practice of attempting to find core players in free agency. By the time a player is eligible to become a UFA, pretty much the youngest they can be is about 27 years old. By that age, they’re far enough past their prime that it doesn’t make sense to pay them into their mid-to-late thirties for years that in most cases wouldn’t be their best ones.