Apologizing in advance for a long post.
Thinking about Meier and the need for another good D (IMO), I wanted to play it out and see where we'd land if we actually did both. I used Chychrun as the D acquisition because he is available and the Sabres are reportedly interested.
Traded Krebs, Bryson, Savoie, Rosen, '23 1st, and '24 1st to acquire Meier and Chychrun.
Signed Meier for 9mil, signed Dahlin to 10mil, Power to 8.
Re-signed Mittelstadt to be 3c, but you could replace him with another UFA if you want. Same for Jost and Girgs. Replace them with other role players if you wish.
Also signed Levi and Ryan Johnson and a few other prospects.
Here's where I ended up in 24/25...
This is a strong lineup top to bottom. We should have no problems scoring and definitely be in the playoffs, maybe even a contender by this point. And we're under the projected cap.
As far as problems, maybe we could use a really good bottom 6 C who can take faceoffs and PK, has size and physicality.
We only have about 1 mil in cap space, so we're now up against it and will find it challenging to make more moves. We were not able to afford Oloffson even if we wanted him. I think you could argue that Dahlin will be more than 10mil too, so there's that.
The following year, the cap will likely go up a little higher, but we'll need to re-sign: Kulich, Quinn, Peterka, Joki, and Chychrun. The good news is that I worked it so Mittelstadt, Jost, Girgs, Asplund come off the books, so we get a little room. But that won't be enough to bring back all five of those key FA's unless the cap somehow goes way up.
Our prospect ranks were heavily depleted, but we still have Ostlund as a good C coming up, and several other F's with potential (Bloom, Poltapov, Kisakov, Kozak, Nadeau, etc.) Not much in the D pipeline and remember we haven't had first round picks in 23 or 24. We do however have our '25 1st which in this scenario would be the following year.
So, to summarize: the roster looks great and if all goes well, we are likely to be winning lots of hockey games and contending to win it all. We are not quite in cap hell yet, but heading there, and we've still got some prospects, but it's unlikely we'll be helping out the D core with young cheap players any time soon. We're also hoping that everything goes great with UPL and Levi in net. No guarantees there, so it's possible that is still a weak point.
So... with all that laid out, I am again back to not wanting to acquire Meier. I'd rather bring in a good D and leave ourselves a little wiggle room, knowing that we are already in a good place at F. I learned from this exercise that I was probably discounting the cap issues more than I should have.
Having seen this laid out, anybody willing to change their mind on Meier, one way or the other?
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