It’s ok to have these kind of net negative losing moves every now and then.
We overpay or lose value in like every transaction. Trochek? Overpay in term. Copp? Overpay in assets. Nemeth buy out? Overpay in draft picks. Goodrow? He’s just overpaid by half a million or so. Buch trade? We didn’t get enough back, but it’s ok cause we couldn’t afford him long term.
Every time it’s just a little bit of an overpay and the apologists say “I’m ok with it, it’s just a little overpay, not the end of the world, I’ll let the experts worry about it, we are better today because of this overpay.”
But overpay after overpay after overpay means you are not on a level playing field anymore, you are operating with less cap space, less assets than everyone else. It’s a losing management style and you don’t see Cup winners spawn out of it. The teams that win, among other things, are the teams who take advantage of these systems and exploit them for value edges. Tampa manipulated the cap. Colorado has like a thousand young players locked up to long term value contracts because they were smart enough not to bridge everyone.
We are consistently mediocre in our management of these systems. We are not finding enough transactions that we are clearly coming out ahead since Gorton departed and that’s a big, big problem with Drury so far. I suspect it’s because he has no experience as a GM.