Dubas did not have to do anything as hasty as moving 1st round picks to "wipe clean" the previous acquisitions done by Lou. Nobody put a gun Dubas' head said he has to move Marleau. He's using wet wipes to clean up his own messes: Ritchie & Mrazek. The Mrazek situation is a very curious one. He moved a 1st round pick to move on from an often injured goalie, and now he's acquired another often injured goalie. Why hasn't he learned from this earlier mistake? I'll tell you why. He has to because of the cap situation.
Blackwell and Boosh were acquired to move on from Ritchie. I mean Blackwell's contributions...are they worth mentioning? Boosh was ok, but didn't truly tilt things in TOR's favour.
Gio was good and I'll give Dubas credit for that.
Dubas went with Samsonov and Murray for sake of the cap. We'll see how this goes, but if I were a GM I wouldn't bank on them. I don't buy for a second that Murray/Sam were the best choices. Kyle has no cap space and no assets to trade. That's why TOR has Murray/Sam.
The goalie market has what appeared to be a limited amount of players to sign, but that's not the whole truth. A GM has the entire league of players to choose from, but a tight squeeze with limited cap/no picks/no prospects has had KD restrained. Lou is long gone. KD has only himself to reflect on.
He didn't NEED to move Marleau right away, but it was his an equivalent of making the team better, through a de-acquisition. We basically signed Tavares, at a cost of a first and moving Marleau. Marleau isn't moved, we don't have Tavares. Maybe you are in the, we shouldn't have acquired Tavares camp, but that would have left us quite weak at C, as Kadri was absolutely getting moved no matter what... Maybe there were other options, who knows.
Bringing back Mrazek just wasn't an option. We know that. It cost us 13 spots in the draft, and we shall see how that plays out. From my perspective, I don't care too much, as we didn't miss out on anyone I was particularly interested in.
Yes, we are cap strapped, though moves could have been made, if we really wanted a particular goalie. I see these as stop gap situations, which given our compete now situation, kind of sucks. A flat cap wasn't predictable, so hard to really be bothered there.. we should have been like many other teams, Pittsburgh for example, where the cap grew, and the big contracts weren't a problem. If it wasn't for Covid, we'd be at $86.5-88 mil right now, and we wouldn't be that worried about things... but, it is what it is.
My personal hope is that Samsanov plays well, and Woll steps up to become a NHL player this year, with Murray getting injured enough to go LTIR.
