People talk about the Hossa trade like it was a strategic choice based on hockey, and not a trade forced by the salary cap.
You also have to keep in mind that Atlanta took Greg De Vries as a cap dump along with Hossa. We were in cap hell and Hossa did not want to work with the team. Which I am not blaming him for, it's his responsibility to advocate for his rights not to manage our hockey team. But that's the reality of the situation. He wanted top dollar, and we didn't have cap space.
Hossa wanted more than Alfredsson. That was his right, but they couldn't keep him under the restrictive salary cap. If you combine De Vries and Hossa's cap, Heatley's cap hit in year 1 was almost half of the cap that they moved out in that trade.
The only way to keep Hossa would have been to give up on being a contender and do a very risky re-tool to move out money. Or to do something like Alfredsson+De Vries for Heatley.
Even then, if you look at Hossa's history and the trajectory of our team, he is probably gone to a contender when his contract is up and we are on the downswing.
If we managed to keep Chara, maybe that changes things, but that also is not guaranteed under the salary cap.
The salary cap really screwed the timing of our build. If we built that equivalent team 3-4 years later, we keep most of our stars. The early years of the salary cap were difficult because there weren't any strategies or norms developed around the cap, and none of those contracts were signed with the idea of fitting them under a 39M-50M salary cap.