I largely agree with
@simon IC . I don't think a Petro-less Blues team is a contender unless Kyrou immediately improves to a 50 point guy AND one of Dunn, Faulk or Perunovich is immediately a top 25 NHL D man. Our team is built on being a good (but not great) offense that plays a defense-minded game to support an elite blue line. We are one of only 2 teams in the cap era to win the Cup without being one of the top 5 teams in goals per game in the playoffs. Our offense has a well balanced attack that can score goals but we rarely take over a game offensively. We rely on our blue line for a lot of points and Petro is easily our best D man at doing that. With the direction the NHL has gone, I don'tsee how our forward group is good enough to win without an elite blue line.
Petro is a top 10 NHL D man. There is no internal replacement. The absolute best case scenario is that you get 2 D men to take huge strides in the offseason, split up Petro's roles between them and get them to provide most of what Petro provides. The blue line can still be good without Petro, but it isn't elite. And this team isn't good enough everywhere else to contend with a good-but-not-elite blue line.
To contend without Petro, we need both of the following to happen:
1: Mikkola is immediately ready to play 21+ minutes a night of above average defensive play vs other teams' top 6 (and 2:30+ of PK time a night).
2: Kyrou is a legit top 6 forward next year. Not a guy who can hang on the 2nd line. A legit, true top 6 forward on and off the puck.
In addition to those things we also need one of the following things to happen:
3a: Dunn is given the #1 offensive D roll and goes from 25-35 point guy to 40-45 point guy AND either Faulk or Perunovich is a 25-35 point guy in a 3rd pairing role
3b: Faulk takes the #1 offensive D roll, returns to 40+ point form AND either Dunn and Perunovich can be a 30 point guy in a 3rd pairing role
3c: Perunovich is a rookie of the year candidate AND Dunn/Faulk see slight improvements from their play this year
I don't think we see all of those conditions met and if they don't get met then we are a good team that is a tier below the top contenders in a division that is getting ridiculously good at the top. If we're not willing to give Petro a good enough contract to stay, then there is zero reason to believe we would overpay a game changing forward UFA by an even larger margin a summer from now. A flat cap is going to make every team around the league even less willing to trade high end players who aren't overpaid, so the game changing forward isn't coming from outside the organization. We don't have any prospects with that upside, so the offense isn't taking major leaps in the next couple years. By the time we might acquire a game changing forward, Perron is exiting the productive stage of his career, ROR and Tarasenko are hitting UFA and who knows where Schwartz is.
I realize that I'm veering the topic away from the original question, but my point is that I don't think a flat cap changes what we should do much if we let Petro walk. I don't think we are contenders next year without Petro, so letting him walk should trigger at least a retool to focus on 2021/22 and beyond. If we aren't willing to pay Petro now, we also shouldn't be willing to pay Schwartz the contract he will require to stay because it will require as much pain/overpay at the end. If that is the case, then we should trade him this summer and return an asset for him before he walks as a UFA. At that point, you should fully commit and move Allen/Bozak mid-season because they certainly have value at that point (especially since you can retain major salary on both). At this point, the flat cap isn't much of an issue because we wouldn't be spending up to the cap until a couple years down the line.
Any conversation about Petro walking needs to be about whether this team should
1: try to do a 1 year retool with a focus towards reopening a window that will close 2-3 years later
or
2: try to do a 2-3 year retool with a focus towards reopening a window that might stay open for 4-5 years.
I think those are the realistic avenues to another Cup. I also don't think we will do either and will instead be a competitive team that isn't good enough to reach the Final again under the current ROR/Tarasenko deals. And then we would have to go through a major rebuild.
I think all of those 3 options are worse than just paying Petro his f***ing money, keeping the window on a damn good team open and dealing with the pain in 4-6 years. Our absolute only avenue to remaining a contender without Petro requires multiple prospects to take huge leaps quickly. Which begs the question: wouldn't we be incredible if all that happened AND we kept Petro?