You can keep moving the goal posts all you want but there’s been numerous posts here insinuating we won’t be able to keep any of our core because of the Pietrangelo situation.
There’s literally a thread a few posts down from here where the majority of people voted that we wouldn’t be able to keep Parayko.
I’ll admit, at first I blamed Armstrong for Petro leaving but now it’s pretty clear that Alex would still be here if he wanted to be and wasn’t so stubborn. Armstrong is signing everyone else with ease it seems like.
Pat Maroon must not love his kid. He could still be in St. Louis if he was willing to accept whatever lowball offer Army would give him. If Perron walks because Armstrong won't give him a competitive offer at his age, he must not want to be here. Let's ignore that he has signed here twice: once after getting traded and once after getting exposed in the expansion draft. If he really wanted to be here, he'd accept whatever Armstrong offers, no matter how low it is.
Give me a break with this "If he really wanted to be here narrative". Nobody is arguing that Pietrangelo couldn't have compromised down to what Armstrong was offering and accepted an offer to remain a Blue. Likewise, he'd be a Blue if Armstrong was willing to compromise up to what he wanted. The question that is being discussed by the more intelligent members of the board is which one if any SHOULD have compromised, not CO
ULD they have.
As to whether we can re-sign our players, most of the trepidation with Parayko (at least for me) was because he was a big Oilers fan growing up. Having won a cup here, I didn't know if he could pass up the boy hood dream of playing for Edmonton. The NMC question is about players who could get an NMC elsewhere. Those are generally the upper echelon players. For whatever reason Parayko didn't sign a contract of an upper-echelon player. That could be becuase he loved it here and took a team friendly deal. It could be because people get paid for offense and his numbers are merely ok. Or it could be back-related. Whatever the reason,not many $6.5M contracts have NMCs.
Can we re-sign ROR without an NMC, or could we have signed a guy like Dougie Hamilton? Those are the questions the NMC will play a role. And it will only play a role if that particular player puts any value in an NMC. Not everyone will. But I doubt anyone is arguing that we should give NMCs away like candy on Halloween. Its just a tool that we should have in our arsenal for the right player. If its not necessary, then its not necessary.
Also, we didn't sign Hoffman, Chara or Sutter. All are guys we expressed interest in. So we didn't sign everyone with ease. We signed the guys we signed with apparent ease, because we don't see the negotiations. Who knows how hard it was to sign them. We could have paid significantly more AAV than their next best offer and we'd have no clue.