"one or two people" Even you must know how much of bull- err....
Naah.. I won't continue this discussions as it's off-topic.
What I'm curious is how does Pitt's cap handle this? Brassard and Sheahan probably walk as UFA. It does leave very little cap space even after those two if I'm reading NHLNumbers correctly.
Brassard walking as a FA (if not sooner) and us dumping Oleksiak for whatever solves the cap issues. With this contract we'll have around 4m to sort out a 3c (assuming we move Oleksiak and do not take back any salary).
The lineup would look something like this:
Guentzel - Crosby - Hornqvist
Pearson - Malkin - Kessel
Simon - XXXXX - Rust
ZAR - Blueger - XXXXX
XXXXX - XXXXX
Dumoulin - Letang
Maatta - Schultz
Riikola - Johnson
Pettersson
Murray/X
That's 75.25m. If you figure the depth guys make 750k, that's 78.25m and the only piece missing is a #3c. The issue is beyond next season when Schultz and Murray need new contracts and depth guys need raises. But this doesn't really cause any issues for next season.