Quote:
Originally Posted by Buff
Catching up on this thread and reading about McDrai taking discounts to stay in Edmonton make me do some looking up of the Oilers cap situation. Even if those two take a discount they won't have enough Cap to go around to fill out the rest of their roster.
These guys come off the books:
Draisaitl - $8.5
J.Skinner - $3.0
Perry - $1.15
C.Brown - $1.0
Ryan - $0.9
Bouchard - $3.9
Emberson - $0.95
Neal - $1.91
They want to keep Draisaitl and Bouchard and they have $21.31M to give those two and replace the leaving players. Maybe Drai settles down for $12.5M... is that a discount? ... That leaves $8.81 for Bouchard... is that even enough for Bouchard? How much will the cap go up? Not enough to pay Drai, Bouch and replace the outbound players.
Draisaitl's agent would be very dumb to not realize and inform him that he won't get the money he wants from Edmonton with the team being competitive. He can take a discount and stay and lose or he can go somewhere else, get his pay day and probably be in a better situation.
Draisaitl is gone. Edmonton is done. McDavid will follow right after that. Edmonton's situation can best be described the same way we describe their team and city. No Good.
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Exactly. If he wants to be on a competitive team for the future he should go to a team on the upswing that still has cap flexibility going forward. That’s not to say he should go to a team in full rebuild but there are teams out there that aren’t in the “capped out and aged out” phase of their competitive window like the oilers are. The oilers are already the oldest team in the league and don’t have the prospects or picks to have a second wave of affordable young complimentary players come in. They will keep getting older and keep being capped out - even more so if he and McDavid were to re-sign.
LA is a good example. They are competitive. The Doughty and Kopitar contracts don’t have much left on them and I could see both of them taking short term deals at lower cap hits to finish off their career in LA. They have a good prospect pool. Their younger players are developing into taking over the larger roles from their veteran players. All this points to a team that can afford to bring in Draisaitl and keep getting better. Added bonus that you get to live in Southern California instead of Edmonton.