Kings Gameday: It's Like, Irony, or Something

Jiri Hudler would be a good idea, as would Franzen. I don’t know, I see the Kings trading a couple guys for a higher impact player this off-season.

Make em both happen. Trade a couple guys to get a “name”, and then replenish some of that depth.

I’ve long advocated, ever since Lowe popularized their use, the idea of financially shafting your rivals through RFA action. Don’t like the Ducks? Go offer one of their RFA’s a raise. Don’t make it huge, where the other team has no chance to match it, cause then you’ll be stuck with the guy. Just give him like 1-2 million more than the other team would’ve liked to have given him. The other team will grumble, but probably match it if they have room, especially given how slow the process is in the NHL of moving from draft pick → NHL player. Now if you do this to a couple of teams, or multiple times to a team, you’re killing everyone else’s cap space. In return, others are less able to be flexible with their rosters, and you are now a more attractive team to free agents, because you have more cap space than your rival. Obviously, this goes both ways, so you’ve got to be real careful about who you allow to become an RFA, but whichever GM does this first is going to catch an inordinate amount of shit, for being the smartest in a sea of mostly idiots.

I’d be surprised if no one tries this with the Wings, with either Leino and Hudler being RFA’s this offseason. They’re so strapped, that forcing them to give even 500K raises really hurts them, and if you can get the player on your team instead, for what is pretty close to market value (or lower, considering what market would actually work out to in UFA), you’ve definitely got a win. Not something many people get over Ken Holland.

Obviously this works with other teams besides the Wings too, I just really wonder if anyone will ever actually do it. The Flyers (Scottie Upshall), Capitals (Chris Bourque), Sharks (Ryane Clowe, Marcel Goc, Torrey Mitchell, Thomas Plihal), and New York Rangers (Nik Zherdev) are just a couple of teams at a glance that I would be quick to pick on as well, if I were a GM of a team in contention, or trying to rise up to contention. How much would it suck for the Sharks to build a great team like this year’s, and have the vultures pick off a bunch of quality depth by losing some/all of those RFA’s to offer sheets, or be forced to screw up their salary structure, in order to keep them?

Frankly, draft picks aren’t worth that much in the NHL these days, again in part because of the length of time between drafting a player and getting him to be a productive player in the NHL. If you can blow a draft pick or two on acquiring a guy who is already at the point where he’s ready to be in the league, and is just about to enter his prime, and you can force the deal to be at decent value, because your opponent is cap-strapped… why not do it? Lowe had the right idea, he was just completely retarded and went about it completely wrong.

Maybe the 1st one, since it was deflected, but the other 2 were pretty soft.