I'll keep this post short as I feel I'll just be repeating myself & I understand that long posts can be tedious to read.
1. I never said it will be easy to dump Zaitsev. What I did say is the cost will be lower next year when he only has one year left on his contract, especially after his signing bonus is paid. It will cost something, but less than it would if he had 2 years of term remaining. By some of your own fans metrics one year of cap for Zaitsev = 2nd round pick. So 2 years = Qty two 2nd round picks, 1 year = Qty one 2nd round pick. I'm not trying to identify the exact return here. I'm just demonstrating the concept.
2. By major roster surgery I mean that the Senators will not by keeping all the players they'd like to in 2023-24 (i.e., Debrincat, Zub, etc.) if they also have to pay Chychrun's AAV. I have a spreadsheet, but including it will result in a real long post. You can visit the Senators website and see the spreadsheet & exact numbers. I'll give you the name of the thread and the post # if you'd like. This is simple stuff and all the players with expiring contracts and everything else has already been incorporated. Nothing has been missed.
The other thing is that if Dorion was willing to move Sanderson, Grieg or Pinto, the deal would have been done in the summer. There would have been absolutely nothing stopping him from pulling the trigger. I think the team is poised to run with mixing in their 2 good prospects in JBD and Thomson in to the lineup both of whom are RDs.
All good -- we're at the point where we can decide to disagree if we want.
1) Maybe I misspoke, you're right that you didn't assume it would be
easy to dump Zaitsev but you are assuming it is 100%
possible without a Chych trade (within reason). I mean obviously it's possible but imo there's a good chance the price will be so high a dump won't happen. Two examples are TOR and FLA (before the Tkatchuk trade), anyone doing a similar spreadsheet would assume you'd just subtract Kerfoot and Hornqvist bc you'd think those would be the easiest players to move. Unfortunately Kerfoot is still on TOR (in response it looks like they're just not going to sign Sandin), FLA thought it'd be better to basically throw in Weegar to the MTK deal rather than pay whatever it would cost to dump Hornqvist for only one year. Both only have a year left on their deals rather than two.
Anyway I think (as does everyone else) that you should be able to easily include a Zaitsev cap dump in a Chych deal, but if Chych gets traded somewhere else I think there's a legitimate chance the cost of dumping will be so high you'll decide it'd be less painful to just keep Zaitsev / make the cap work some other way (much like TOR and FLA are doing this season). In which case you'd be at that 85-86m level anyway.
2) If you'd otherwise be stuck w Zaitsev, in terms of CAP ONLY, including Pinto in a deal for Chych (along with Zaitsev and maybe another good but not great prospect like Brannstrom) would I think be the simplest way to relieve some cap. In this situation a Chychrun trade would obviously help, not hurt OTT's cap situation.
3) If Chych ends up being traded somewhere else, I could easily see a situation where OTT ends up deciding to trade Matthieu Joseph for an ok return to a team like Detroit rather than have to pay whatever Zaitsev's dumping cost ends up being (which ofc it will be lower next summer just like Kerfoot's is right now).
4) If you're assuming you'll 100% be able to dump Zaitsev (outside of a Chych deal) then ofc adding a 4.6m player for 3 years makes your cap harder to juggle, that's not at all what I'm saying. All I'm saying is that I don't think it's that simple to dump bad contracts (and the TOR / FLA fans who are paying attention would likely agree with me), assuming a Zaitsev dump as given is not something I personally would be comfortable assuming.
Thx for the good discussion!