There were plenty of posters on here who thought the gm had made the smart move not overpaying for a goalie
No one wants to overpay for anything, ever. So that's not an incriminating statement. And most of the statements you're referring to that were being cautious about that type of move were WAY more about being realistic about our dodgy chances at a Cup than being content with the goalies we have. In other words, the argument was,
"We're beat up, so let's maybe not mortgage everything trying to improve our 2% chance of winning a Cup to maybe 3.3%. Let's manage our assets better in the offseason when there's exponentially more value to be had."
The argument was NOT,
"Let's keep these goalies because they're awesome and our prospects are awesome and our draft picks are gonna be awesome!"
or even as another poster just said, last summer.
We had cap issues over the summer and two cheap, cost-controlled keepers that had a decent chance of improving. Standing pat wasn't a terrible move at the time. With the benefit of hindsight, sure. But any idiot with a time machine can make all the right GM moves.
If the asking price is a roster player like McMichael or even lap, then imo they should have gone for it.
If that were even remotely true, we would
all have thought they should go for it. But it had
nothing to do with the asking price and
everything to do with us being capped out. Trading McMichael would only have bought us his salary in cap space, which is nothing. If you're after a proven goaltender with a chance of having something real left in the tank (Gibson, Varlamov, etc.), you'd have to move way more salary out.
And this isn't a video game where you can just say, "Okay, take one of our brutal contracts! Take Kempny or Hagelin or Schultz!"
Any team we dealt with would have known they had us over a barrel with our glaring goaltending needs, so there's no way they trade us a valuable keeper, retain half his salary, AND eat a bad contract.
Look, I'm not saying that a deal wasn't possible, but it's WAY more complicated than you're making it sound. You're coming off like it would've been easy to upgrade our keeper situation in a big way and we just decided not to. That's not what happened.
They basically folded the last 3 seasons including this one by not getting a real goalie after holtby
I don't disagree with you, but again, it takes hindsight to put it that plainly. They had every reason to be optimistic about Samsonov's ceiling. He was a highly touted prospect. And they didn't put all their faith in him blindly. They went out and got one of the best goaltenders who ever lived to back him up. No one saw the heart issue coming and we ended up leaning on Vanny. Then Vanny played admirably under the circumstances and Sammy had some injury issues, and COVID gummed up the works, so there was always a reason to kick the can down the road a bit.
Then cap issues in the offseason led to them gambling on the huge cap savings we'd yield if one or both found another gear, the cheap options at the TDL were injuried, we couldn't afford someone more established, and here we are. A lot of things happened to land us here. No one just decided to piss away competitive years banking on bad goaltending.
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