Caeldan
Whippet Whisperer
- Jun 21, 2008
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Don't get it.
You don't have to know about every possible deal to know that any possible deal would probably entail giving up some young pieces we don't want to give up yet. We're just not that deep to be able to pay the steep prices for a significant upgrade, especially when a crappy lateral move like Stewart is priced into the stratosphere.
FA hash is made through finding value more than anything. See: MacArthur, Clarke. You want a big splash? We have rarely made a big splash even while our window was open.
We lost two major core players due to the budget.
There's also others that we may have wanted but weren't interested in us due to the optics of the budget - that's hard to quantify. I still say we re-signed Michalek at the price we did solely to meet the cap floor in case nothing else happened.
Stastny, Boyle, Stralman, Hemsky, Ehrhoff, Moulson, Vrbata all were free agents who changed teams this offseason that may have been interested in us if we were interested in icing a competitive team, never mind those who were available last off-season and possibly scared off due to the optics of Alfie leaving.
This isn't a budget thread though, so I'll drop this line of conversation at this point.
As far as Cameron goes. I can only hope it's temporary but we get an interesting run out of him.
And regarding Mac changing - well he even admitted it in his exit interviews last season, but was supposed to have swung back closer to his original message for this season. Maybe that didn't happen enough.