Too much too fast. Can’t sign Tkachuk and Kadri or we’ll have no cap room for our young guys like Z and Terry next year. That defense is nowhere near good enough to get a team through a playoff series anyways. Down for Tkachuk, but even still this team is 2 years from competing seriously and need to plan accordingly

They’ll have enough. Shattenkirk, Grant, John Moore, Stolarz, and obviously the original deals for Terry and Zegras along with Drysdale come off the books next season leaving the Ducks with over $16 million in cap space, and that’s not even factoring in some of the extras that I brought in in this ACGM which brings our cap space higher. I don’t think Terry gets more than $6.5-$7 million AAV for 6-8 years and Zegras will probably pull a Kaprizov and ask for a 4-5 year deal at around $4.5-$5.5 million AAV so that he can bet on himself to potentially get more per year in the future. Drysdale is probably the big wild card and how much he gets will depend on how he does this coming year, but I expect his contract to be the cheapest of the 3 regardless. Add to that the cap will increase more next year which will give the Ducks even more cap space on top of that. And if you’re worried about trading a 2023 1st round draft pick away because of how deep that draft is, well as far as I’m concerned and as great as that draft is, Matthew Tkachuk is easily better than anyone from that draft not named Connor Bedard, Matvei Michkov, or Adam Fantilli…maybe Dalibor Dvorsky too but that one’s a toss up, and while sure the Ducks probably still aren’t a playoff team this season, they’ll definitely be better than they were the last several seasons which means the likelihood of the Ducks pick winning the lottery will be slim and given my mock conditions on the pick, the Flames may very well gamble and choose to take the 2024 1st depending on where the Ducks end up in the standings. So honestly if this is what the Ducks have to give up to get him and he agrees to a lengthy extension, then I’m all for it.

That is way to much for the Ducks to give up for Tkachuk even with how badly I want him to be added — that makes no sense for us

This team has $6M space. If Z/Terry AAV is $7M that’s $11.5 more than their current cap. Drys at $4.5 brings that to $16. Only meaningful contract coming off is Shat at $4M. Yes, some small ones here and there like Stolie and Grant, but they’ll be replaced by players with pretty much the same cap hit so it’s irrelevant.

Also, you spent 500 characters talking about why they should trade for Tkachuk, when I agreed with you there. My point was to not spend $9M/year on 31 year old Kadri, since the team isn’t ready to compete even with him (see the defense). He’ll be declining in 2 years when the team is ready and a huge burden on the cap/payroll when guys like McTavish, Mintyukov, Zellweger etc will be needing contracts

No team will trade for Maxime Comtois