How on earth would LTIR help things? It doesn't even kick in until you are up against the cap. We have 10 million in cap space and are likely only going to sign Calvert, McBackup and qualify Golo who combined may make 5 million.
As far as next year's cap goes we are looking at dropping Rene's salary of 3.5 million and will likely replace a number of guys with much better prospects on entry level deals (i.e. Tropp, Morin, Prout). Even with the Clarkson albatross we are in a pretty good position cap wise (particularly if he can regain his form while here) for next year.
As to our standing near as one of the top 10 "cap teams" that is simply misrepresenting the facts. The Cap space table you mentioned is for this offseason where we have a few small fries to resign. A bunch of teams will pass us in terms of spending for example NYR (Stepan, St. Louis, Hagelin), Detroit (Nyquist, Jurco, Zidlicky), PIT (Martin, Erhoff, Lapierre), etc. And this is all before UFA spending is factored in.
Did the Horton situation suck? Absolutely. Do we have a bunch of bad contracts (Boll, Bourque, Clarkson)? Yes. Are we even close to a cap squeeze? Probably not till 2017/2018 when Joey is going to wring every cent out of the front office while simultaneously all our great prospects (Dano, Milano, Rychel, Wennberg, Bjorkstrand, Anderson) come off their first deals.