You have a truly stunning ability to not look things up when you spout off like this with a grandiose theory. Kotkaniemi does not play 'huge 5v5 and PP minutes'. He plays 15 minutes a game. That's 3C minutes. He has the 8th most minutes per game on the team for forwards. Again, 3C minutes. He plays on the 2nd power play unit. These aren't huge minutes. He does play with some of the best players on the team and doesn't score many points, but part of that is that his IPP is wildly low this season. He's not pulling his weight financially but he's not a huge liability, and almost every other team in the East has a bigger one on their roster, or did.
The Hurricanes didn't get rid of Hamilton because they signed Kotkaniemi, they didn't sign Hamilton because they think more than a year ahead. They weren't willing to commit the amount of money the Devils did to him, not even close. Hamilton and Horvat will cost $10M more than Kotkaniemi + Gostisbehere next season.
This is some solid post-hoc reasoning - Pacioretty played 80 games out of a combined 138 the last two seasons. They traded for him and he got injured training in the off-season. Then he came back and immediately got hurt again.
This is silly, the Devils are dealing from a position of massive strength because they've been awful for the last 5 years, and the 'Canes are not dealing from that same strength. It doesn't matter what tier of the Devils prospects they dealt from - they have a huge stable and no matter what they did for Meier, they were going to keep most of their top prospects.
The 'Canes cap situation is phenomenal next season (and next season alone). After 2024 it gets tougher with Necas and Pesce being free agents, but their cap situation is far superior to ours and probably anyone's in the Eastern Conference. They of course have to take advantage of that.
You are inventing a bunch of asinine reasons why an organization which is otherwise completely ruthless with regard to improving their team year after year is somehow fixated on one player. You've also got the Kirby Dach deal all wrong, which doesn't even need to be mentioned - the main piece in that deal was Alex Romanov who went to the Islanders, the Islanders pick went to Montreal, and they traded that to Chicago for Dach.
1. The Devils paid Hamilton $9 million per, which Carolina could not afford last season. When Carolina made the Kotkaniemi deal they paid him $6.1 million. They then couldn't come to terms with their then-27 year old all-star defenseman and fit him under the cap. So they let him go and acquired Tony DeAngelo at $4.8 million. Essentially, they let a Norris-caliber D go so they could spend $2 million more on a low-compete, replacement-level forward and a borderline AHL-caliber defenseman with mental problems. Carolina's upset loss to the Rangers in last years' playoffs was greatly influenced by the almost jarringly awful play of both DeAngelo and Kotkaniemi in the series. But boy, did they stick it to those Canadiens!
Carolina did not let a prime-era, all-star RD go because they were "thinking about the future". They let Hamilton go because
they forgot to think about the future.
2. So, Kotkaniemi centers Carolina's 2nd line wingers and the 2nd PP, but he's somehow not their 2nd line center. I see. Hm.
3. Some solid reasoning that the Pacioretty trade was not risky because he played 80 out of 138 games. Well, now it's going to be 83 out of 220 games. When can we call him injury prone?
4. Fitzgerald absolutely deserves a world of credit for acquiring an all-star forward in Timo Meier without giving up any of his top 3 non-NHL assets (Hughes, Nemec, Holtz). No one expected this.
5. You got me on the Kirby Dach deal. I confused the assets exchanged for 13th overall pick with the 26th overall pick with all the trades Montreal made. Even so, Dach is a better player than Kotkaniemi now and going forward, and at a lesser salary with a higher compete level. All in all, the Canadiens made out pretty well in the long run.
Look, I appreciate you trying to defend the Carolina management. They deserve kudos for hiring a great coaching staff, cultivating a great atmosphere around their arena, and drafting exceptionally well year in and year out. But my point was many of their personnel decisions over the past two years have been remarkably poor. I said I liked the Burns deal when they made it and the Puljujarvi deal wasn't half bad. But let's face it, the Kotkaniemi deal was made strictly to stick it to Montreal in revenge of the Aho offer sheet, and the fallout from this childish move and the refusal to move on from it has greatly hurt the team's Stanley Cup chances. I don't see how this argument is triggering in any way.
Regardless, the Svechnikov injury likely takes the Hurricanes out of any realistic Cup contention this year, so we'll never know. I don't legitimately see how they are going to get by the Rangers in the first round of the playoffs, to be perfectly honest.
