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Originally Posted by strombad
You contradict yourself. You say you don't mean to say they should spend to the cap for the sake of it, but then say it's baffling why it was "smart" not to retain salary. Which is it?
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What I meant was that we don't need to go out there and give the best FAs top dollar simply because we have the cap space and because both of them would make our team better right now. We should however be using it to gather assets that will grow with our group of guys and be ready when we're ready to make the jump like St. Louis or LA has in recent years.
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We got a first rounder and a couple prospects of questionable value for a defenceman who was largely overpaid and was riding the high of a good shortened season. Bouw got 5 from the Blues for the play that was seen during last season, which is arguably the best he has played in his entire time as a Flame. He was playing his best, and took a paycut.
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He was "largely" overpaid but you think that at 5.4 million he took a pay cut? Which, if you factor in the pay cut you say he took means he's what?...1 million overpaid for just over a year? That's hardly an immovable contract and with a year and a half left on it, and it's definitely not a handicapping contract. It's just a contract that could be a little nicer but is not awful.If a team thought it was awful we could easily have taken back salary and made him either fair value or a bargain contract and with our cap + playing situation that's hardly a big deal for us.
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There's no way of knowing a better offer was out there, it's not like teams were clamouring for Bouw by any account. It was smart to retain salary, because if you don't have to, you DONT. It was unlikely to get us a better prospect, and eating a couple million wasn't going to get them to throw in a second or a third.
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If you want to turn it into "well you don't know what's out there so therefore it's good" then that's your prerogative. But it is false that Bouwmeester wasn't clamoured after....assuming you have the same information the rest of us have. There was tons of rumours about teams like Detroit, Philly and Nashville(amongst others) being interested in him.
Why is it that when I question the return for Bouwmeester you say there is "no way of knowing" what other offers are out there but when I say that taking back salary would increase his value you
categorically state that it wouldn't net us a second or third? Have something you'd like to share or would you like to re-examine who's contradicting there-self here?
But just for fun, I'd like to hear why we wouldn't get more for taking salary back on an asset. Would you honestly say that if we made Bouwmeester's contract a 5m cap hit for the taker that we wouldn't get more back...would there not be more teams able to accommodate the contract thus creating even more competition? Would he not represent value for a team that's adding additional pieces at the deadline? Would ~1.6 million free for an offseason not be useful? How about if we knocked his price down to 4m? 3m? What difference does it make to us
right now if we have ~10 million in cap space as opposed to ~13 million for one season? It couldn't have been for off season spending because we were never going to be in the running for any of the top guys entering a rebuild, we weren't going to pay a goalie with Feaster signalling he wanted to try Berra and Ramo this year and 10 million in cap space is easily big enough to still take back salary, be it in the form of a dump or miraculously getting a superstar for picks and prospects.
So my question to you is, what is the competitive point of having so much cap space? It's definitely good to have some flexibility but we aren't using roughly 20% of what's available. What's the good in letting that much sit idle? For short-term purposes(say taking a contract for a year or 2) it does NOTHING for us. I don't think we're gonna have a NYR style off season any time soon and we aren't a team like Colorado where we have a glut of youngsters that will need to be paid shortly, or a Florida/NYI where there is a budget. Why not take advantage of the fact that we have owners who say they are willing to spend?