[sureLoss]

Originally Posted by Enoch Root

To put the King's situation into perspective:

They have 7 forwards, 6 defensemen, and 1 goalie signed for next year (including Richards) at a cap hit of $54.2M

They need to re-sign (or replace) Williams, Stoll, Pearson, Toffoli, Clifford and Shore, among others. Just the trio of Williams, Pearson and Toffoli will cost more (probably much more) than $10M to re-sign.

The cap was projected at $73Mish assuming a dollar of 88 cents. But the dollar is now at 81 cents, so the cap could easily be going down next year (and there has been recent talk of $68M).

Their team is still pretty young and is clearly and definitively in win-now mode (Kopitar, Doughty and Quick are in their primes)

But there seems to be no way that they can keep the team together while they are wearing Richards' contract. However, if they could dump it, they would be at $49M and would have the room to sign the above mentioned guys.

If they can't move him, this team will be ripped apart.

No doubt they will find a way to do something without moving Toffoli. However, the situation is pretty bad and I would think they are better off biting the bullet and making some kind of a deal, as opposed to doing nothing and sitting on Richards.

By the way, sending Richards to the AHL only gains them $400k in cap relief at the most. They get $925k in relief, but then they need to add another body and even at the league minimum, that's $500k.

That's impossible. That would mean perfect - who can do no wrong - GM Dean Lombardi made a mistake by not using a compliance buyout when he had the chance