The cup winning goalie putting on a smythe worthy performance, twice, was uninspiring?
Very definitely, yes. Not that he had anything close to a Smythe worthy performance in reality, but the averaging stuff is there because the Wings were the best team.
With Luongo, that's a four 1st round pick deal.
The Wings don't do 1st round picks for a while here...
No McCollum (30th, bust), they traded 29 for 32 and 75 at the '09 draft; no Sheahan (21st, 4th liner), in 2011 they traded 24 for 35 and 48.
32 and 75 are Landon Ferraro and Nestrasil - so nothing much there. 35 and 48 are Jurco and Ouellet - not too much there either.
So, the draft picks netted basically nothing for them.
The cap would have been about 7 bills.
Osgood and Hasek were making less than $2 mil combined I think. I'm assuming it's Osgood that gets dealt again...so there's about a mil back. I don't think they net any meaningful asset out of Osgood. Maybe a decent or mid-round pick.
They acquire Bertuzzi in 06-07 and they don't really deal any salary back...so I imagine that deal is off the table. Which is no great loss for Detroit.
I don't want to over-simplify, but this seems to cost the Wings fairly little. I'm sure they'd have to maybe "downgrade" a depth d-man...like the physical, but unreliable Danny Markov.
The Wings go 16-1 in 2008 with Luongo. And depending on how they manage the finances of it all, they're a legit threat to win in '09 and '10 too probably. As much as Luongo is sort of a non-serious player at times, he's so much more talented than Osgood that it's worth the weaker mental game.
2010 they get dumped by San Jose...but they lost that series despite the performance of Nabokov in some respects. If they could have zipped up the net a bit more with Luongo over Jimmy Howard...that's a winnable series. I don't know if they can get by Chicago's firepower, but they'd at least have a shot. I also figure Howard would be dealt for scoring help at this point.
It's always a lot of what-ifs with these...but goaltending was the hole in the death star on these teams, a little bit by design...
Luongo gets a lot of "I told you so" points if this goes down...maybe so much that he and Lundqvist swap positions on our top 60 list.