I honestly think we're not trying to win until 2025-2026. Many contracts will end that year. Hoffman's contract ends this year. Armia, Dvorak, Savard and Allen contracts end summer 2025. Also after 1st july 2015 there will only be 2 millions remaining to give to Price in base salary with a cap hit of 10.5 millions so his contract will be moveable in the summer of 2025 after his big last signing bonus is paid.
We'll start trying to compete for real in the 2025-2026 season when we will have lot of cap space. Until then we will develop and keep trying to trade bad contracts.
There's no doubt that Hughes won't be making any huge splash until his bad contracts to veterans are in order, and that might even mean being stuck with Gallagher's contract on the books because it was so badly structured that there is a Trojan Horse Cap impact in any year you decide to buy out the contract. Even buying out the contract in the final year (2026-2027), which would normally represent 2.17M per year for two years, if the money had been evenly doled out, actually cost 3.833M instead of 6.5M in the first year of the buyout! That's almost 60% of the Cap hit in that first season of the buyout. Sure, it falls to a Million and change in the second and final year of the buyout, but the first year's savings is marginal, IMO.
If the Cap goes up to 95M for the 2025-2026 season, as projected with anticipation of the players' debt to the League being paid out at the end of this upcoming season, Hughes could be sitting pretty in the offseason just prior to that year.
He'll actually have the financial means to go with his ambitions!
Basu's musings that Montreal should consider signing Nylander as an UFA if he doesn't sign with the Leafs is pure malarkey. Not that Nylander isn't a good hockey player, but because he'll be 28 for the first year of his likely overly long UFA contract that will, at the minimum, take him through age 34, if n to 35.
Also, Nylander is looking to earn North of 10M. It's just too early for such a move from Hughes, IMO, two off-season two early, may be three.
Add Nylander at 28 in three years to players like Suzuki at 26, Dach, Caufield and Newhook at 24, Slafkovsky at 21, Anderson at 31, Guhle and Mailloux at 23, Reinbacher and Hutson at 21, Matheson at 31, and Xhekaj at 24 years of age.
Montreal still remains a very young team, but several of its best prospects will have just grown out of the gangly teenage phase and Nylander would be playing with a greater number of prospects reader to have an impact for a greater number of years.
IMO, Nylander is too soon.