If Botts balked at that deal he’s an even greater fool than we suspect, and we already suspect he’s hands down the worst GM in Sabres history.
Oh I don't know about worst in team history. But certainly not ready to have steered the team when he got here.
Who knows what really happened, but I play the most likely options from either side. If you want to defend botts, you say Reinhart wanted to bet on himself. If you want good players on low caps for team success, you think Botts didn't trust Reinhart with a longterm deal.
The bridge deal is usually only a wise decision when a good team needs to create time for cap space. So a bridge could not have been to create space to keep the contending going.
And we know they agreed to 3.5 or so. So even on the bridge, he took a decent size number, a number high enough that there were not huge savings over the course of the bridge anyway.
Which leads me to believe that Botts really thought it was a good idea for Reinhart to prove himself, after three years, only 4 after being drafted and with no season under .5 ppg, two 20+ goal seasons and literally no one on the team to supplant his role on the team.
As I said before, there was basically no way short of injury for Reinhart to not improve his counting stats when they made this deal. He was gonna play the whole year with Eichel, he had always shown steady improvement and was coming off a 40 game stretch of ppg play.
The O'Reilly trade was dumb, the mitts and tage stuff was dumb, Housley for year two was dumb, but for my money the bridge deal for Reinhart is unimpeachably stupid. I'm not talking about the wing nuts who can't get over their hate for other posters or belief that they were entitled to the best possible outcome of a 2 overall pick.
If you rationally work thru every likely outcome, the position of the team, the role of the player and the player's history and decide, nope I can't give this player 6x7 or around that, the only conclusion I can make is you are unable to do this job.