Ok, let's then focus on what we do know.
Since the start of the cap era, there has been only one team who was at the bottom of the league in spending and still made the playoffs.
One.
That team is the 06-07 Penguins, who had Crosby, Malkin, and Fleury looked up on ELC deals that were each under a million. The total cost of those three contracts was $2.83 MM. That Pens team was blown out 4-1 in the first round of the playoffs.
That works out to 1 playoff appearance leading to a total of 1 playoff game won over the past 9 seasons. The results were similar pre-cap as well, although one bottom spending Minnesota Wild made a run for a couple of rounds in the early 2000s.
Is that tangible enough for you?
Or were all of those teams simply not trying to win, and no players/trades were available to them?
Teams that do not spend do not acquire good players and end up sucking. It all there if you look back at what happened to bottom spending teams in the past. The thought that we are somehow different, and that our situation as a bottom spending team is different from every previous bottom spending team, is nonsensical to put it very, very mildly.
Preach my brother...preach!
I laugh at the idea that since we are young, we can't spend. Even if every young player's contract went to RFA status this summer and they were signed to league average deals, the Senators would still be at the bottom of payroll.
For all the talk of prospects and depth, we really don't have much of either if the GM seemingly can't make a trade of one or the other without crippling the team further.
That's were the Ottawa Senators stand. They have players like Zbad, Stone and Hoffman that would be valuable trading chips to other teams for a salaried player of the Ryan caliber, but we can't trade those guys because of the holes in the line-up they would cause.
And that glut of d-men on our roster? We can't trade Karlsson. Methot is now damaged goods whose value drops by the day, and Cowen and Ceci can't be moved as a pair to net a great defensemen because that would create another hole on D. And sadly, Phillips, Gryba and Boro don't return much on the market.
Do we trade Anderson or Lehner? Can't do that now because we have no goalie prospect in the pipeline to immediately replace them. Anderson could use a break but sadly, his back-up is Andrew Hammond til Lehner returns. Trade one of them in a package and Hammond would actually have to play.
That leaves free agency as the best chance to improve the team without damaging the pipeline.
Because of the payroll, we go dumpster diving for reclamation projects. MacArthur panned out, Legwand hasn't.
