Roster Building XXVI: Picking Our Teeth Off the Ice

[CanesFanBudMan]

Personally, I'm in favor of focusing more on getting better top 6 forward talent, and rolling with Morrow and Nikishin in our top 4 defensemen next season. Sign either Marner or Ehlers in the summer, and trade for a centerman for our 2C

… and then sign McDavid next summer

 

[TheReelChuckFletcher]

We really only have 1, maybe two, more years to play our games with having a ruthlessly efficient cap structure. More likely, we really only have this summer to really lay some groundwork and make some moves because change is a coming with the massive jump in the salary cap in the next 3 years and beyond…

The salary cap is going up so much that there is no way quite a few teams will be spending to the cap.. a lot of teams are going to willingly take on contract dumps just to make the cap floor. Big spending revenue teams are going to be able to get out of jail free on bad contracts even easier. They might even have teams pay them to take the bad deals if they have high cap hit and low actual cash left to pay…

The cap isn't always going to go up like crazy for eternity, especially with expansion on the near-horizon. There can always be another unforeseen event like COVID or a major recession that warps the marketplace again. Also, with Dundon at the helm and as long as our team is one of the best, they will spend to the cap. The teams that may not spend to the cap anymore are the teams who are on the bubble.

Also, when the cap is particularly high, the cap floor will become almost as important to league parity as the ceiling. It may end up being the case that a new inefficiency shows up when it comes to lower end teams needing to reach the cap floor while keeping the rosters bad enough to lose for draft picks.