Miller Time
Registered User
- Sep 16, 2004
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I was going to do a more detailed analysis of the cap structure but I wanted to go to sleep. I spent a couple days going through various sources to do the rest of the post. I didn't factor in dead cap in Weal or Alzner, and you're right, that would make it even more abhorrent.
Mostly you'll find that most cup winners have the same sort of structure with their top 6 making the bulk of the money and usually only 2 or 3 highly paid Dmen. It's uncommon(I didn't see it in the 9 years I sampled) won the cup paying more than 3 dmen a high salary. That seems to be the way to make sure you're a competing team. "Defense wins championships" isn't shown statistically in the NHL from what I went through. The Pens went back-to-back with barely an NHL-caliber defenseman in their lineup.
This piece alone is a fireable offense...
while some fell victim to the "let them eat cake" affect of "doing something" in the offseason, the reality is that the Allen signing, compounded by the extension, while great a vacuum ignoring cap realities, was not a smart move... 15M$ of cap, in a year where you have 4.5M$ in dead money already, for goalies??
ditto Edmundson... adding 3.5M$ to the depth dman cap burden, while continuing to have a major talent gap in quality top-4 caliber dmen.
Absolutely horrendous management of the cap, and, as is being exposed, all for the purpose of icing a borderline playoff team roster that folds with any bit of adversity.
FFWD to the 2022-23 season, if one does a deep dive of the likely cap situation there (minus some heavy lifting to offload some of the brutal deals he's saddled us with), we could be staring at an even worse situation that will directly impact our ability to manage and negotiate proper, tactical RFA extensions btw now and then to Suzuki, Romanov, Caufield, JKO, Evans, Primeau (and any of Poehling/Ylonen/Brook or any other prospect who may progress to NHLer worthy of locking up by then). He's really built a cluster F*** of a cap situation that will take a competency in planning and roster building that he has shown not to possess, to get us out from under.
the sooner we make a change, the less further damage he can create.