badrogue17 wrote:
Restricted FA after this year. You gotta pay this guy. Can we pay this guy what he's going to command ?
Not without a huge rise in the salary cap, which seems impossible given the way the Canadian dollar is going. There's half a billion coming in on the Las Vegas expansion team, but that isn't counted as hockey-related revenue: all of it goes to the owners and none to the players.
It's
possible that you can talk Panarin into a small discount to stay with a winning team, but that requires winning (duh) and a transaction that will encumber future winning, whether that's losing Kruger to expansion or trading Anisimov.
Offer-sheeting Panarin will cost a team, at the very least, their first-round, second-round, and third-round picks, and possibly all that plus their next first. That disqualifies a lot of signing teams off the bat because they either don't want to part with three picks or they don't have those picks in their possession (and I think for RFA-compensation issues it has to be your natural pick, not one someone traded to you; I know you can't submit an offer sheet if you're missing the picks but say you'll trade for them in time for the draft). I think you have to approach this as if you can sign him and make the necessary cap space to do so, and work the trade market accordingly: let someone blow you away but try like hell to sign him. If someone offer-sheets him to over $7.51MM per, which is the 1st-2nd-3rd-1st level of compensation, admit you're licked and take those draft picks. We could use two firsts, especially medium-to-high ones.
Things are going to get tight next year one way or the other, so go all out to win the Stanley Cup a fourth time. I don't think there's a team in the league the Hawks can't beat in a best-of-seven. I felt like we had reached the end of things after 2015, I still feel I was right, but the Western Conference collapsing on itself cracked the window back open. But after this year, with the cap crunch, everyone another year older, and the highest-paid player in the world admittedly becoming uninterested with his job, it's hard to see many more opportunities.
Quote:
Also heard Kap reference losing Saad had something to do with Saads father ( No, not Bossard) holding up the deal with the Blackhawks?
Yes, Saad
pere, who is Syrian, told Brandon to squeeze every last cent out of his contract to better aid their relatives back home. It's hard to begrudge him that, in all honesty, unless perhaps "Saad" was an Ellis Island modification of "al-Assad."
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Molly Lambert wrote:
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