Can't see us anywhere near not having the extra 4 million dollars in the bank to acquire an asset like that. He won't play the entire season next year in Hershey. He'll go home before he does that and then you've got the whole 7.8 back. It's a gamble but at worst you tie up an additional 4 million that you probably won't need anyways, at best you get it all back for nothing.
I won't pretend to understand the life of a professional athlete at all because that mentality is wild to me but... to have a father who deteriorated thanks to a brain disease and then father like 4 kids of your own while bashing yourself up and taking multiple concussions later in your career while continuing to injure yourself in other ways, talk about how there are days where you just can't walk well, and still keep trying to play NHL hockey is... extra wild to me.
There is no doubt the best outcome is mutual contract termination. So GMBM has to be working that angle hard and it will take time (like to the draft). That will be a big (but unheralded) move. If he can’t do that, I would do the buyout. Paying $2M in 25-26 and saving 4M next year is good choice. A lot comes off the books in 25-26.
See? You all didn't have to wait THAT long, eh?
If I could quote my post in the Kuznetsov thread, buying him out is more expensive monetarily and affects 2 years of the cap while saving only 100k of actual cap space compared to a full retention trade in the offseason.
Lapierre have looked great since he returned. 4 Goals, 2 assists in 5 games. The question is if he can handle more minutes. So far he have played around 11-14 minutes while CMM plays around 5 minutes more. So Lapierre while he gets minutes with Ovi are playing 3rd line minutes for the Caps.
Ehh we will see. I look at CMM as Lars Eller 2.0 when he was at his peak. Good 3C on a good team, can play 2C for a bit. Lapierre while he is having a good stretch I can see being a similar player, high end 3C with a ceiling at 2C.
I see Lapierre as a PPG player. You should go to the prospect page and look at his profile. The kid persevered, and was viewed as top 5 talent. He’s the perfect center right now for Ovechkin. Good vision, and can play 200 feet.
Bring UFA Chandler Stephenson back?
I don't think Suzdalev has much value. I think he's probably been exposed as a beneficiary of playing on the same team as Bedard. He has been such a disappointment.
Based on this framework, with Oshie on IR and Backstrom on LTIR, and with McMichael and Malenstyn still needing RFA deals, they head into the offseason with 17.9M in cap space. If Oshie joins Backstrom in LTIRetirement it jumps up to 23.7M. Definitely a lot of room to work with, plus a lot of picks (now at 11 picks in the first three rounds of the next two drafts), it's gonna be fun to speculate this summer on how they'll use it.
Who in Hershey is ready to make the jump?
