It's just stupid. Every team has 20 McCormicks, he's proven nothing at the NHL level except that he isn't an NHL player. Shades of the Boro signing who got a 3 year one way contract after 20 subpar NHL games.
Almost 6 mill in salaries for Burrows, Boro, Thompson, McCormick
14 mill for Phaneuf and Ryan.
We have to be one of the worst cap managing teams in the league. A money scrounging budget team at that!
Thank the lord for Boucher and Karlsson.
It doesn't really work that way. If those guys are all going to be in the NHL (next year for McCormick when his 1 way kicks in), we're not spending 6M on those guys....we're paying whatever the difference is between those guys salary, and league minimum since we'd have to have replacement players if we didn't sign them.....although, players rarely sign for league minimum....
None of those contracts have bad cap hits on paper. I didn't like how aggressively the Senators went after Thompson with a NTC and his salary given how little hockey he has played due to injuries over the past few years along with the optics of giving a 4th line/PK specialist a NTC, but on paper what he is making is ball park for a 4th line centre.
I don't like the 2 year term on the Burrows deal, but if we replace him, we aren't getting a veteran 3rd liner for cheaper cap wise, so I don't have much of a problem with his cap hit.
Boro's contract is very cheap for his role, and McCormick's 1 way next year is league minimum. Whether or not you like them in their roles is a different story, but getting players the team is intent on using that cheap isn't a waste of salary.
We're really spending about 3.4M on getting our ideal players there, but even then that number is high because it is very very rare for players to sign for 650k and that number assumes whoever we'd have replacing the four players you mentioned would be making league minimium. You can't take the good of Guy Boucher (the Sens actually being a consistent effective team) without some of the bad (being extremely picky over players, and needing 4 lines of depth). It's pretty clear to get the most out of Boucher, we need to spend on guys like Burrows and Thompson that he is comfortable with deploying, otherwise we get what we had last year where he is barely playing Puempel/Kelly/Neil/Lazar as 4th liners, and double shifting our top 9ers which over an 82 game season+playoffs would result into them being driven into the ground.
