- Jan 18, 2022
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Your argument fails both waysYou can't have it both ways.
If you aren't competing, then having laine provides 0 benefit since you only have control over him over the next 2 years. (and if you trade him for I assume a 1st, 16 mill is a hefty price to pay for a 1st+2nd)
And if you are competing, then the cap hit matters
Just because a team doesn’t have the pieces and chemistry to consider itself a competitive one prior to player acquisition does not mean it should not make attempts to improve the roster. This isn’t a on-off switch, it isn’t binary where a team goes from Bad to Good with a press of a button.
Teams have to build up, often iteratively, and Laine could prove to be part of that competitive roster even as early as this season.
Claiming that a young, offense-starved team doesn’t have any chance to benefit from the acquisition of a skilled forward because its current roster isn’t sufficiently skilled at forward… is a very bad take. D-.
If the Habs are splurging big futures it would be one thing, but they explicitly did not do anything of the sort.
As for the cap hit… the core pieces are all signed and extended. Carey Price’s 10.5m LTIR hasn’t even been touched the last two off-seasons. Plenty of cap inefficient depth guys are moving on next summer and the one after to be replaced by cheaper AND better options.
Laine was a perfect trade for the Habs BECAUSE of his high cap hit. The Habs got paid to try him out… the only other chance the Habs would have would be to sign him as a UFA. He gives the Habs a super deluxe two year trial period before he becomes a 28-year old UFA, which is typically the age players become UFA in the first place.
Either way that the evaluation goes, the Habs have the inside track and will make an extremely well-informed decision at that time.
So it is short, medium, and long term upside for the Habs.