lol why not? Are you saying that the money they spent on Chiasson, Kassian and Turris is money well-spent or that they couldn't have found better players for the same price?
I'm saying that at worst, you have to take the part that those guys were overpaid by, not the entire contract. Turris, I would count the whole thing because he was a major bust, but the other two are NHL players. But let's look at it in context, and not just the numbers. Kassian was overpaid a bit to keep him from testing free agency. Then he regressed. It sucks. Should Holland have let Kassian go? Maybe, he's certainly not worth his full contract the way he has played recently. But given what he produced the year prior, and in the playoffs, and the fact that he checks a lot of other boxes - fast, hard hitting, enforcer. I mean, he was a 15 goal, 30 point player with size, speed and a mean streak. For the last year he has had injury issues and possibly motivation issues that affected that. I would suggest though, that despite your assertion that it is lighting "3.2M on fire", it is lighting 1 - 1.2M on fire in terms of an overpayment. Chaisson was a 20 goal, 38 point guy the year he got his extension. Is 2M too much for him? Yes. Yes it is. Was I mad that he was re-signed? Yes, but only because it meant that the other free agents either chose to play elsewhere or wanted too much to play here. I would say he was a 1M overpay, so sure, that's possibly lighting some cash on fire. But, you need to remember that Chaisson was only signed because there was nobody else there to fill that role. 2M is also a fairly inexpensive player to begin with, and he contributed about as much as a $2M player should. It isn't the $2M guys that hurt this team. It's the lack of quality $4M guys in the middle six. I would say the much larger issue this past year was the fact that Holland was tied up with zero inflation dollars to work with. We let decent players go for nothing due to no inflation. We did find a good bargain in Barrie, but we were so restricted by that lack of cap space that Holland had to go digging in the leftovers bin again. This isn't because he signed Chaisson and Kassian. This is because the economic plans for these teams was thrown into a blender and basically destroyed. It just sucks for us that it meant no decent depth signings last offseason. You keep ignoring the biggest factor here.