Putting my irrational fan cap on and thinking out loud...
If the hold up with the EK deal is Melnyk is just insisting on Ryan going in the deal, could we swing it?
We'd have to ship salary out to make it work for 2019-20 & after. A-Mac & Weise cover Ryan and would have to go in the deal just to make the salaries work. So then we'd have to have cap left over to budget for Provorov & Konecny getting raises. Lehtera, Simmonds, & at least one of the goaltenders expiring roughly gets you there, after you trade Wayne for futures and replace all of them on the roster with guys on ELCs. That leaves roughly 13 million or so in cap space, not including any raises in the limit after next season, to extend EK & fill out the rest of the roster, not including other guys with expiring contracts and cap space they take up like Raffl, Weal, & the other tender. That seems tight but is doable, I guess?
How buy-outable is Ryan's contract? Would we have to protect him in an ED? You'd have to think that taking Ryan's contract on fully with no retention and without f***ing around with a 3rd team to make the deal work would lower EK's price substantially, there can't be a helluva a lot of market there.
EK & Ryan for A-Mac, Weise, 2019 1st, Rubtsov, and a conditional 1st in 2020 if EK re-signs or something based on that sort of framework?