I wouldn't be surprised if they valued Tarasenko fairly highly. He has 41 career playoff goals (in 90 games played) and he had 6 of them in 2 rounds last year. He hasn't been as good this year as he was last year, but he's still scored at a 24 goal and 70 point pace.
They only have 5 every day forwards who have ever had a 20 goal NHL season (Matthews, Tavares, Nylander, Marner, and Bunting). They also have Wayne Simmonds, but he is pretty much washed and has just 5 goals in his last 82 NHL games. After those top 5 studs, the offensive firepower gets thin real fast. They are running their top 5 forwards into the ground because the other forwards aren't all that great. Their 6th most-used forward plays 15:15 a night. Our 6th most-used forward (Tarasenko) plays 17:29 a night.
Plunking a guy like Tarasenko on the 3rd line and 2nd PP unit would likely help their secondary scoring quite a bit.
I think either of ROR or Tarasenko could be appealing to them as their main deadline upgrade.
With that said, I bet Barby is very appealing as a secondary upgrade and they should absolutely be looking to add two forwards. With 50% retention, Barbie's cap hit is just $1.125M. That's not much above league minimum, so he's an upgrade that wouldn't require much (if any) cap creativity. If I'm Army, I set my asking price with Toronto at Knies + 1st for whichever of ROR or Tarasenko they like best (with 50% retained obviously). They aren't going to do that, but instead of negotiating down from our asking price, start including Barby (with 50% retained) in the deal.
Barby/Tarasenko was two-thirds of a pretty damn effective 2nd line last year and Barby was playing center on that line. There is a lot of appeal to just building a 3rd line around them. Barby/ROR haven't shown that same chemistry, but they could try Barby on the 2LW with Tavares/Marner and then make ROR the 3C with Jarnkrok and Engvall. Either way, the middle 6 should get way better at the cap cost of just a pro-rated $4.875M against the cap. They are going to have a tough time finding two acquisitions of that quality that combine for less than $5M against the cap. They can make the cap work on that by sending Kampf back to us as part of the deal (or Kerfoot or Engvall if they'd prefer) and running a 22 man roster after the deadline.
Bunting-Matthews-Nylander
Jarnkrok-Tavares-Marner
Engvall-Barby-Tarasenko
or
Bunting-matthews-Nylander
Barby-Tavares-Marner
Jarnkrok-ROR-Engvall
with Kerfoot as the 4C
Those are a couple legitimate looking 3rd lines that look a hell of a lot better than the McMann-Kampf-Engvall group they are running out there tonight.
If I'm Army, I'm pushing that narrative hard and asking for Knies+1st+Ottawa's 2023 3rd (or Toronto's 2024 2nd).
I gotta admit that paints a pretty optimistic picture and one I had not thought of. It would be interesting to see if that could happen.
