The "Bridge Contract" is still alive!
Seeing some of the other post-ELC contracts going around the league over the past 12-14 months or so, I thought Dorion was going to be forced into giving Ceci a deal based on future projections instead of past performance, and pay out the nose for anticipated future production. Glad to see I was wrong!
Dorion's been knocking it out of the park on the internal stuff so far in his limited stint as GM. Hoffman's contract was surprisingly low (especially having him commit to that $3.8mil number for his last RFA year, based on what a lot of people expected, and based on the market value for players with his kind of numbers over 2+ seasons), and he managed to talk Ceci into taking a bridge deal with a high QO number rather than a 4 year deal that would have taken him to his last RFA year and in his prime (basically the same situation Hoffman was in this year).
I won't dock Dorion any marks for not grabbing any big UFA names this summer, because that was never going to be in the cards for us due to the budget. Dorion can't control the budget.
So after Ceci's deal, we currently sit, what... $6mil shy of the cap, with essentially a completely full roster?
I imagine we might still sign that depth defenceman Dorion has been talking about, but even if we sign a guy for like $1.5-2mil, we'd still have ~$5mil open under the cap (because then we wouldn't count Kostka's $800k NHL salary, who is our current 7th D).
Not horrible. Not great, I'd love to see that spare $5-6 mil we have open used towards the on-ice product (short-term depth additions, etc...), but at least we're around 20th in league spending, instead of bottom 3-5, where we used to be. Baby steps.