You don't need some special qualifications to figure out that if the Ducks really needed to drop the small amount of his contract not covered by LTIR, the likelihood is that they will pay someone a mid round pick to take it. There are *always* teams with some cap space willing to take on a dead contract/LTIR for picks
They certainly aren't going to throw their better trade chips into the deal just to bring in a bottom pairing D.
The concept of spending $1m in cash to get a $5m cap hit to reach the cap I don't believe applies this summer.
The cap floor is $60.2m.
As of right now, there are only 6 teams who have less than $64.5m in committed contracts:
- Florida with 13 contracts at $60.5m
- Colorado with 14 contracts at $59.1m
- New Jersey with 13 contracts at $55.2m
- Buffalo with 10 contracts at $47m
- Detroit with 11 contracts at $46.8m
- Ottawa with 10 contracts at $42m.
Of those, Florida, Colorado, New Jersey will easily hit the floor simply by filling out their roster.
That leaves Buffalo, Detroit, and Ottawa as the teams who are at risk of being below the floor -- and they're likely to have quite a few teams looking to offload high cap hit players to them.