No no no no. Stay with me here. I'm not spending them money saved by buying them out. Not spending it at all. On anyone. At all. Anyone. Said that in a post however many pages/posts back. You wouldn't have to spend any money to replace them I said. So I didn't. I just want them to go away.
And if they go away, somebody else needs to be playing where they were. Those someone elses require money and thus take up cap space. It might come from prospects being called up, or it may be replacement fourth-liners out of the UFA market if one is so inclined. But they don't just vanish into thin air. You can't have a "fourth line" of Calvert-Karlsson-Anderson if there's not enough players for the third line. Who Else Goes There?
Here's the problem as I see it. We need 14 forwards for the NHL roster. We are presently committed to 11 (Saad, Dubinsky, Foligno, Clarkson, Hartnell, Atkinson, Jenner, Calvert, Wennberg, Boll, Campbell). That will presumably become 12 as soon as Karlsson is re-signed. So there's two open spots already. Probably realistically three, since Clarkson is perpetually injured. Now we take out Boll and Campbell entirely because we don't like them - we're now up to five roster spots to fill.
Do we really, truly, think it is so necessary to get rid of Boll and Campbell altogether that we want to be one more injury away from
half our active forward corps consisting entirely of rookies? Do we even have enough NHL-capable prospects for that, such that we can shuffle between here and LEM in case some of the kids don't work out?
This is why I keep ranting about replacements - because the alternative is potentially emptying the farm as soon as anything at all goes wrong. That sure as hell sounds to me like a recipe for disaster. It's not that I
want to keep Boll and Campbell - it's that I don't see any realistic alternative. I prefer a scenario in which they're stapled to the bench as frequently as prospect management concerns permit. But they can't Just Go Away.
Somebody has to be covering that ice time.
And seriously if that's where you have to go to buttress your perspective, it's not much of a perspective. What is a strawman to a man made out of straw? Whatever that is, that's what your post is. Also, nice quoting of only half my post. Not that it matters. I'm OK with removing those two players and not replacing them with anyone. But I'm assuming you read where I wrote that it probably wasn't going to happen and I don't expect it to happen and I'd settle for this to happen.
"Not replacing them with anyone", again, leaves us with a roster that cannot ice four lines because there are not enough players to get on there. Unless we do a lot more double-shifting.
And I'm not concerned about decision making on this sort of thing, or about it coming up again later (at least not with you). It's more this apparent lack of concern about the amount of responsibility we're dumping onto a large number of rookies already.
Or maybe you're just being purposefully ignorant or obtuse just to see if I'll want to light you on fire to see how the other half lives.
I've tried it. It's not all that bad.
