It took me awhile to digest things. I think one of the biggest things to get past was it helped the Oilers. The more I thought about it and with the Oilers eating salary on Lucic and with their current list of buyouts, both players will be on the roster until the expansion draft at the very least.
In no way are the Oilers is a better position cap wise as there is very little chance they will buy Neal out and add 2M over 6 years. If Neal was the only buyout then sure I could see it, but once you add Sekera, Pouliot and the 750K from Lucic it would be around 6.6M is dead cap space if they bought him out after 1 season.
At the end of the day it is change of scenery change for both players. Both are bad contracts and I find it unlikely that any of the players will live up to their cap hit.In the end, in a cap system, you have to work with what you have. Neal's contract wasn't going away and it clear he wasn't a fit. Lucic does fit a better role on the team. It will be interesting to see how all this plays out. I just keeping going back to my original thought that I hope this isn't helping the Oilers.
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