FWIW, Tom Dundon talking about the offer sheet and his general approach in the Athletic:
LeBrun: Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon on the Jesperi Kotkaniemi offer sheet, losing Dougie Hamilton and sports betting
No master plan to get the Habs back for the original offer sheet:
“
If we had re-signed Dougie [Hamilton] or 10 other things we tried to do, this doesn’t come up. But when you’re sitting there with a bunch of cap space that you’re not going to be able to use and looking at your choices — we went through many, many choices — this just happened to be the one that ended up being executed. But there was no grand plan … we didn’t set out to do this two years ago, even a month before. There’s always lots of options to look at based on the order things happen. When this came up, this one actually worked. But we could do lots of columns on the 100 ideas that don’t work or that we don’t execute."
On the risk/reward of overpaying Kotkaniemi:
"
Well, we’ll see. If he plays good, then it’ll make a lot of sense. If he doesn’t play as well as we’d hoped, then no matter what we do it won’t make sense. But the contract is the easy part. If you pay the money to players who play really well, then it sort of doesn’t matter. The number is the number. But they got to play good. You don’t win if they don’t play good, regardless of their cap number."
On what he is and isn't willing to spend on:
"
We’ve been pretty consistent. The things that make the biggest impact in all pro sports are the players. We all get a little self-important, probably, about the role of the people that don’t play. And so I just came to the conclusion that the players — the cap space is a fixed cap on the team that you can spend, and if you spend more, you give yourself a better chance to win. That is the only thing I know to be true in this sport. I don’t know that another scout or another analytics person or a nicer locker room, not sure how much that stuff impacts. And you want to do a really good job in all those things. But I do know what a really good player means. And so we’ve always taken that position — the reality of the business that we run versus what other people run off the ice, which is different. It’s just the way it is.”