There is a HUGE difference between Toronto and the Rangers. Toronto barely sold off anyone in their years of ineptitude. Yes, they had high picks who have developed into leaders in their forward group but they are missing the secondary pieces later in the 1st round the Rangers have snagged over the last few years. Nash, McDonagh, Hayes, Zuccarello, Brassard, Stepan, soon to be Kreider. These trades were done at a time when those players still had significant value and allowed Gorton the ability to add those secondary pieces a team like Toronto is missing. It's one of the reasons Gorton is looking like such a genius, he didn't wait too long to make a course correcting decision and he has been able to build depth throughout the system at nearly every position.
I don't know. They had Bozak, Kadri, JVR, and Gardner as some pretty decent depth pieces. Some tough players that score ugly goals, do dirty work. They lost that depth because of Marleau and Tavares.
Toronto stripped it down decently. Sure it could have been better, and Lupul and Horton didn't help. We have dead cap too. Girardi this year, whoever gets bought out for probably 4 more years. Who ever doesnt get bought out for 2 more years. It's a better situation here, but not to the extent we can just shrug it off.
I don't know, maybe I'm pessimistic. Cap flexibility would have been nice to lock up Trouba long term, then ADA and Buchnevich long term at a future steal. Now we have to eat up future cap with buyouts, forego a bargain signing for bridge deals. Do we go to arbitration with trouba and then eat a mega signing next summer?
We project huge cap space down the line but $11.6 is going to a winger, a chance that our $7.5 #1 d will turn out to be $8+ next summer, Buch and ADA at 6 x $4.5 are $6.5 per in 2 summers, Kakko and Kravtsov are $8+ coming off ELC. Then the other dozen players we have to sign, but we are projecting 2019 dollars because they will be ignorant to the new TV and won't know about inflation.
I guess I'm not buying into the idea that if we have cap problems later on, it means our players are awesome. It sounds like a bannable offense meme from the Oilers board.