love EK but we're not taking on his contract again lol

I love the player to death, but I wouldn't take that contract back at 50% retained. That deal will be nothing but trouble long term.

That’s absolute garbage for SJ. EK has been real good when healthy for them.

You have found the perfect words to describe EK situation, WHEN HEALTHY because when he's not he became a nightmare for the salary cap.

The Senators wouldn't do that. Karlsson's contract is too expensive, and too much of a liability. He is in a similar spot to Matt Murray, where his ceiling as a player is really high, but consistency from injuries is a major road block.

If San Jose took Matt Murray and some combo of White, Zaitsev, and Del Zotto, while also paying Karlsson's signing bonus, I could see Ottawa doing that if the off ice politics of it were workable. The Senators are a budget team, so they would only care about real money, not the salary cap. A trade with that format would clear the Senators around 10 million dollars in salary in the short term. It would get San Jose out of the Erik Karlsson contract without retaining. Outside of Colin White, any players San Jose would take as cap dumps would be off the books in 2 seasons. Erik Karlsson won't be off the books for 5 seasons. It would basically be the Phaneuf to OTT trade all over again.

LTIR and IR are things.

Sure they are things the same as why MTL want to send Weber and probably Price out of MTL is that LTIR and IR are not active during summer which mean you got the full contract on the salary cap. So during the summer where you can only be over the cap salary is 10% so that mean you couldn't sign new contract because of the LTIR contract would block it.