TL;DR: If I were the Blues I would simply sign the top free agent defenseman and center, why hasn't anyone else thought of this?
The novel if you are interested:
Expansion list
Forwards: Tarasenko, O'Reilly, Schenn, Thomas, Kyrou, Perron, Blais
Defense: Parayko, Krug, Dunn
Goalies: Binnington
But but but- what about Faulk? Look, Seattle probably won't even take him if he's exposed. If they do, it's fair to say that losing Faulk leaves a pretty decent sized hole in our roster. But it stands to reason that Faulk had a good year this year because of his regression to the mean after an abysmal year the previous year. Losing his contract would be painful if we aren't able to sign Hamilton or acquire a comparable defenseman to Faulk (Larsson, Miller, etc), but it will also be painful to have a bad contract on our books while trying to keep the window open, and that's a significant risk. There's a chance that Faulk has become a different player in a different system to Carolina, but even people who like Faulk have to admit that's an ungodly flimsy defense for that contract, considering the very few examples where defensemen exiting their prime suddenly become good/different players for a long period of time.
If Seattle doesn't take Faulk, I suppose there's no reason to sign Hamilton, or you can sign Hamilton and trade Parayko instead, though that will require some different moves to be made elsewhere. I would also be open to exposing Krug instead of Faulk, but (this year notwithstanding) Krug is the better player.
Signing Danault allows us to move Schenn to left wing full time where there's a need. We seem to think that Schenn is better suited as a center- I'm not so sure. He did not perform well this year at center and we've seen diminishing returns there since his first year. I'd like to see what he can do at wing and get an extremely good defensive center to center our second line, hopefully allowing the O'Reilly line to get more favorable matchups against lesser competition. Tatar is LW depth, he's really good folks! It's very dumb that he's scratched (unless he's injured). Looking for him to be our Craig Smith.
Let Thomas spend the whole year as the 3C. He's 22, so he's obviously not cooked, but we're really looking for this kid to put all the skills he obviously has together at some point. These sheltered minutes will hopefully let him do that and we can move him up if he starts outperforming Danault/O'Reilly. That's a good problem to have.
Re-sign Bozak for a year as he's been solid. Ryan is one of the best defensive forwards and PK'rs in the game for a long long time. Getting him for less than Sundqvist to do the exact same thing Sundqvist does is simply good cap allocation. Some moderate risk there with Ryan's age but I'm going with his proof of concept the last eight years, and it's not like there isn't risk with Sundqvist at this point considering his injury.
Sign Hamilton for obvious reasons if you can get him- he's elite, but he also slots Parayko into a more natural role on the second pair. Look to re-sign Parayko for about what Ryan Ellis is making now. This also allows Dunn to have a Pietrangelo-like partner with which to unlock his offensive game at even strength, at which he was mediocre this year.
Sign Craig Anderson as a third stringer to push Husso and a fallback plan if Husso is still bad. Get Logan Brown as a local boy reclamation project that can be buried in the minors if he doesn't work out.
This is a great team. It's ambitious but all of these players are being paid what the market would demand (per Evolving Hockey's contract predictor), all of the trades were made via rumors or (in Ottawa's case) direct statements from the team about what they're looking for, and there's no reason this team can't stack up against the best in the league (unless Binnington implodes which is always possible don't ever pay goalies for long term).
You're going to pay Danault over 6 mil? He's 4-4.5 mil tops! He's really good defensively,but his offense leaves much to be desired. Not worth that kind of money.
Actually pretty good. I think you could drop a mil or so off Danault though, and I wouldn’t expect that return in the OTT trade. It’s a lot of moves, so not sure how realistic all of it would be, but I wouldn’t be upset with this turnout.
What do you think we do next summer assuming Tarasenko has a decent bounce-back? We would have to re-sign Parayko and Perron.
McDavid, Connor
$250,000)
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