Joined: Jul. 2018
Posts: 349
Likes: 246
As much as this is a minor deal, this is the sort of thing that Bergevin rarely ever did. By paying an AHL goalie real money on a one way deal, you can create a situation where you can send them up and down while still making them feel they are part of a plan, give them some security and runway to develop, and if it works out that he's even a competent backup in year 2 or 3, you have a decent chunk of cap space. Worst case scenario a rich team invested some real money in a young player with no impact to their cap situation what so ever.
These deals fizzle out to essentially nothing more often then they turn into wins, but the risk is essentially 0, so you find a good number of these types of things over the next few years and the couple that do work out are still huge value.