It’s just par for the coarse for these boards really.
Can’t sign a Stamkos, Reinhart or a Marchessaut because of potential future cap issues. Signing someone like Kane will apparently be a locker room concern, etc.
Any wishful thinking of improving the team gets shot down lmao. You see names spat out here like Henrique, Carrick or Manson for a potential return just makes me look at the team as not wanting to strive and be better.
Well it depends on who you're looking at and whether Samueli is still directing the team to operate within an internal budget. I'd like Marchessault on this team. Would I like it if we paid him 7.5m+ for 4 years or whatever crazy shit he can command in this rising cap market after a Conn Smythe and a 40 goal season? No probably not. Not when we have a bunch of RFAs to re-sign within the next 1-3 years and they will be looking for raises between 4-7m.
Ditto Stamkos. I'd love to get him in for a couple years at 8 or so million. Is he going to accept that contract? Almost surely not. Should we bump the AAV and term to buy the novelty of a guy who aged out of superstardom just to buy 60 or so points and the right to add him to the all time roster? In my opinion, no.
Reinhart is due for a mega contract with the way he's been playing in these playoffs. Is he worth 8.5 for 6-7 years in a bubble? Yeah probably considering the increasing cap. Does it make sense to give that kind of contract to a 28 year old who is relatively aged past our current youth core (as in, by the time a lot of our young guys are negotiating their second contracts we'll have his 8.5+ on the books while he's getting closer to retirement age)? That depends on how much of his strong performance comes from the strength of Florida's roster/coaching. I personally don't see Reinhart as a guy who will drive the performance of this team, but a guy who will depend on how well the rest of the team does. I'd be fine with 6 years at 7.5m but he'd probably want more.
The thing is it's nice to think "you gotta pay to play" LA did it and won a couple cups. But they also continued to do it and ended up with the Dubois albatross and f***ed their own rebuild to buy a few more playoff appearances for Doughty and Kopitar. Vegas did it and bought themselves half a decade of playoff performance and a cup. But because they've spent to the cap every year they're stuck with contracts and aging and or broken players and are about to go through ten+ years of being a middling team as a result. You can argue it's a fair trade off but you can't just look at a high level player in a bubble and say "write a blank check to get this guy" especially when you're talking about past-prime guys like Stamkos, Kane, and Marchessault (soon enough). If you can get guys like that on reasonable deals while our cap burden isn't high, then sure, go for it. Overpaying for a guy like that with term complicates future contracts for our young (hopefully) stars for not enough benefit.
But for guys like say, Reinhart, Marner, etc. Anaheim isn't the most desirable market due to current competitiveness, very high tax obligation, and less prestige than a market like LA. If you're overpaying for a star player you better be damn sure he's going to be worth it. In the case of Marner, does it really make sense to give him 11.5-12.5 million for 7-8 years when he's shown that his ability to be a difference maker in the playoffs is suspect at best? Is it worth committing that much money to another guy who always wants the puck and may not perform as well when separated from Matthews and Nylander?
I think there's valid concerns and trepediation when it comes to just blindly throwing blank checks at big name players simply on the virtue that their names are big when the team is already in the process of trying to homegrow a youth core of potential superstars.
Vegas was able to get away with it because they opted to throw all futures to the wind and spend to the cap and it just happened to work for them. Now they've done it again in the hopes that they can repeat. They didn't and they're looking at an era of hockey where they have no depth to speak of, no youth core to supplement aging guys on heavy contracts out, and they're still right up against the cap after the Hertl and Hanifin acquisitions. This team is taking a different approach and I think they should be smart about free agent and trade pickups lest the team burn money for nothing and miss their chance for optimal pick ups that make sense for the roster they're building as opposed to shoehorning in big name players for the sake of getting them as they become available.
