Then Murray really didn't think things through trading for Phaneuf and giving Ryan a huge salary.
Phaneuf trade was the lesser of two evils. We spent less money in the short term on a better player than the contracts we gave up which probably saved us from having to liquidate a player like Hoffman for futures. Greening+Michalek+Cowen was about 12M of salary, and given we wouldn't have shut Cowen down like TOR, if he protested a buyout it might have been successful.
Phaneuf trade was the product of 3 lesser bad contracts. I'm not really going to argue whether those were good or bad signings at the time, it's not really the point I was making in my other point especially since Dorion wasn't even A-GM when we made those signings.
The point is, not re-acquiring Methot may have been budget related. To an extent, that is out of Dorion's hands because outside of moving one of our more marketable players for futures (Hoffman, Stone, Turris, etc), it's not very easy to move cap. It seemed suspect last week that he randomly began shopping Phaneuf after suffering such a huge loss to our d-core, so if that was the first domino in an attempt to get Methot back at a lowered price, that would make sense.
As I said in my other post, if he could have had Methot back for what amounts to a 2020 2nd, and there wasn't anything stopping him like budget concerns...he's a dingus.
