So the blues should be happy that the only way they can get players is to overpay them
An over pay is an over pay regardless how much cap space you have
It's a calculated risk. We
can afford to overpay, especially since Krug is on LTIR and will not play the entire season, especially since Kevin Hayes is gone with no money retained, especially since we've not overpaid anyone above 8.1 million AAV, where we have two in Robert Thomas and Jordan Kyrou. Even Buchnevich took a decent deal to stay.
We were so desperate for defense that we signed Ryan Suter - a man who will be forty in January - to an incentives-based contract and took a flier on Pierre-Olivier Joseph. We were penciling in Scott Perunovich and Tyler Tucker - two defensemen who should be nowhere near a playoff team - as potential second-pairing and third-pairing, respectively.
We were so desperate for secondary scoring and overall depth on our lines aside from Thomas, Kyrou, Buchnevich, and Neighbours that we ended up promoting two twenty-year-olds just getting a taste of the AHL (Zachary Bolduc and Zach Dean) to help our depth, and ended up trading for Mathieu Joseph, Radek Faksa, and Alexandre Texier, as well as re-signing (*sigh*) Kasperi Kapanen.
Now for defense we have Broberg, who will be under no pressure and will likely start on the second pairing (Suter will likely steady Matt Kessel, our young third-pairing right-handed defenseman.) with Justin Faulk. Now we have Holloway, who will almost certainly be middle-six with no pressure and potentially tried out at third-line center (as we could use someone good on the dot, which is one thing, Holloway has proven he can do).
We are under
zero pressure, and all we gave up are picks - picks that we've more than used over the past two years alone - and cap space - which we have plenty of.
The Oilers have short term priorities, It's Cup or Bust for yet another year. Usually that's at the expense of long term priorities. Short term, they needed Vet Scoring Wingers that can be relied upon. They know this cause guys like Foegele and Mcleod weren't reliable in that dept. in the playoffs. They shored up immediate needs during the UFA period where if they hadn't they wouldn't have got the wingers they wanted due to the competition for UFAs. I guess we will see if it's a mistake when these guys suit up for a full year in the NHL, something that hasn't even happened in their careers yet. But alot of this transaction or any in the NHL will depend on how the players perform. We shall see.
I know in a vacuum if given the opportunity to sign Holloway at 2.2M or Broberg at 4.5M the Oilers this year, the Oilers would walk. The picks compensation makes it even easier to walk from.
Yes, your team has short term priorities. That doesn't mean you ignore the long-term. Your team could've more than easily done both. GMs are supposed to multitask. There was no need to sign Corey Perry to that contract. You could've dumped Ceci to the Sharks at any time. You could've easily made the cap necessary to sign both of them before it ever got to the point of an offer sheet.
We may have signed them to bigger contracts than you could afford, but it only ever got to that point because you lowballed your players and ignored them in favor of the newest shiny toys. Just because your team has young players when you're in win-now mode doesn't mean that they should be kicked to the curb in favor of a new plaything; it means that with proper development, those same young players could be key to winning even more down the line.
Winning teams need a mix of veterans and youth. Where's the latter on your team?
