Beniers is expected to be signed after the Frozen Four and also expected to play on the team this season. It burns a year of his ELC but Francis seems ok with that.
. But Francis has stated that his plan is to be aggressively pursue options to improve us before next season. He plans to use some of the draft capital we have accrued to acquire roster players/prospects who can help us right away. He is also ok using excess cap space to get useful players by taking on cap dumps, etc. He has also mentioned improvement via free agency using that cap space but the FA market is rather thin this season with most of the top guys likely to be re-signed anyway. I expect him to get some small pieces to help the top-6 F or top-4 D to fill it out as a stop gap but I doubt they are going to be long term solutions. There is also a challenge to get FA's willing to sign with a bottom-3 team. What he does remains to be seen but it does not sound like either him or Leiweke are ok with finishing as a lottery team next season. 
The Isles are about as relevant as the gnats that live rent free in my house.
My only issue was not using their ample cap space get free assets by helping other deals.
But it's fun. We can all look like idiots later after the fun has been had.
toffoli deal was electric for flames. essentially hughes' first deal and he was arguably impatient. if he sits and waits till last minute, like he did with lehkonen, he upgrades that 5th to another high pick and gets a better prospect. 100%.
Nah.... tearing down and selling the juiciest bits to the highest bidder isn't that hard. Yes, he got good assets in return, but this was the easy part.
I disagree.
B+Hopefully Gorton has been working on finding more scouts, building an analytics dept, and on almost every dept as they are all undermanned or non existent.
Guerin did well. Shored up some places where they were leaking(defense and physicality), but at a relatively small cost. My main niggle was the Jost for Sturm trade. Deslaurier is the perfect low cost add. Hopefully Middleton will add a bit of snarl and defense on the back end. Fleury...we'll see. Jost is a nothing burger, IMO, and I'd rather have Sturm at 1/3rd the cost, but ...we'll see. I see mediocre speed, strength, and skill in Jost. Hard to overcome that. If I hear one more time about how good he is in the room I'm gonna vomit.
MTL cleared out a lot of players, and got a couple of picks, but now Hughes has to make sure that he has a scouting dept. that can spot talent. They have to start hitting on picks, because they just aren't talented enough right now.
