Agreed. Tavares was a high-end UFA who any team would've coveted, including us. The problem wasn't Tavares the player, it was Tavares the contract standard. His salary set the scale for their other star forwards, who realized they were better than their captain and demanded to be paid more. The Leafs have been crippled by a wildly unbalanced cap structure ever since.
They would have been better off keeping kadri and using the savings on addressing the defense and/or goaltending.
Kadri kept getting suspended in toronto, but he was a very valuable peice in the Colorado cup win.
The opportunity cost of signing Tavares was the salary structure as you mentioned, and the lack of flexibility that it presented to address needs that were far larger than anything that they required at center at the time.
Combine the implicit and explicit cost, and it adds up to a very costly signing.
edmontonjournal.com
