Once a Kings Fan Too
Joined: Jun. 2018
Posts: 40,297
Likes: 25,201
Edmonton and Toronto have similar problems: at or over the cap ceiling with a big-cap-hit player that, to put it charitably, isn’t contributing significantly – Milan Lucic and Patrick Marleau, respectively. So an appreciable segment of the teams’ fan bases solves this problem by blithely trading away the financial drag for a 7th-round draft pick, usually aided by some incentives like real players or higher draft picks. News flash: both players have absolute NMC’s, so they aren’t going anywhere, and anyway, solving the cap problem that way is, if not “cheating,” chickening out on actually addressing it head-on. To put it another way, subtract Marleau’s $6.25M or Lucic’s $6M from the payroll and any idiot can slide under the cap limit. The fun, and admirable effort, is in avoiding the easy way out.