So you don't think handing out an eight year deal at nearly $5M per is a contract risk for a fourth liner that plays none of the PP or PK?
Based on his age, no, not at all. How could it?
The center market has been really bad this past couple of seasons.
We get the 1/3rd buyout if it doesn’t work. Looking at the aav it is 0.4-0.9% of the cap today with that percentage shrinking each year. That doesn’t affect us at all.
The FA market in general has been awful the last couple of years and it isn’t like the KK deal has stopped us from making any moves.
If the deal had prevented us from being successful or held us back in other moves, sure it would be a risk. Based on how this management has executed, I don’t see anything to say it is an issue.
This would be the first offseason were we need to evaluate his play and performance, with the market, to see if his contract now is risky. We are going to get tight with the cap. But again the risk will be low, really low, with that buyout. That is without a team like Zona, who has no centers, and struggles to sign guys, being interested.
The argument actually was we’re a better team with KK. Which is preposterous. Your end of it is trying to diminish the need of a 2C with stats. Just because we’ve survived the loss of a player overall, doesn’t meant we wouldn’t be better with the player or with an actual replacement. The team is actively still trying to replace the guy, the organization doesn’t think we’re better or even “just as good”.
We didn’t want to pay 36 year old Tro. That’s it. That’s the reason. It’s not because despite backwards use of stats we can make an argument that KK is actually just as good despite not being just as good at any actual aspect of playing the game of hockey. We’d be better with a right handed center who scores more than Kk and at least chips in on special teams. It’s not a hard concept to grasp.
We didn’t want to pay a 36 year old Trocheck knowing we had a center putting up similar rates of production on the team. I agree with that. It’s not hard to grasp that.
Looking at our results last year, we were a better team and more successful. Sorry you can’t accept that as anything but preposterous.