Do you think inserting Grits and marginally improving upon Palat makes this a Cup contending team? I sure as shit don't and that's all you'd be able to do with what you're suggesting.

That get's you practically nothing. This team needs multiple adds up front. A Palat buyout (would also be much smarter to retain half and move him than buyout) only brings you to ~3 mil in space for next year and you're not adding a body. You're upgrading a body.

Dougie’s a great OFD but we have Luke who can replace him on PP1 and Dougie’s already being used on the 3rd pair this year. 9 mil 3RD PP specialist isn’t worth having when you have glaring needs up front and a guy who can replace his PP value and guys that can fill in on the 3rd pair on ELCs.

It doesn’t need to be exactly Ehlers. If we only have 12 mil I think we’ll end up in a scenario where either the top 6 is fully addressed but depth is lacking or vice versa. Also again that’s assuming you can dump Palat’s corpse. Move Dougie and you can build a top forward group.

I’m more comfortable also moving Dougie and accepting that hit to the offense on the backend to really upgrade up front. Especially if dumping Palat doesn’t work. Say it’s Dougie’s 9 mil out and sign Ehlers. I easily do that. Also think Casey replacing Dougie in like the 22-23 Sevo role would thrive

Let’s say Luke gets 8.5, Glass 1.5, and dump all of Haula/Palat. That leaves you with just over 12 mil, the right side still blocked for Casey/Nemec and needing at least one top 6er, a 3C, a 3rd line wing, and another 4th liner. Doable? Sure but I’m also just not sure dumping Palat will be feasible

To me it’s not even about recouping value. It’s the 9 mil to use up front and having Casey/Nemec. Still not Dougie but I’m comfortable with the tradeoff. Also Jones just brought back a 1st and Knight. Granted for 7 mil but Dougie could bring back some value. I do agree on not trusting management

Palat/Dougie both have 10 team trade clauses though which will make moving them tricky. If Fitz is still at the helm though even if all that space is open I do not have any real faith in his ability to evaluate forwards.

I might be the biggest Zetterlund fan in the world and only person who at the time said they wouldn’t do the deal if he was in there lol. There’s a lot of deadweight that needs to be cut this summer. Haula/Palat need to go. Dougie will hurt but I’d like to move him and reallocate that money up front

Something like this looks much to me and is ~500k cheaper on the cap than what we had

Noesen-Jack-Bratt
Timo-Nico-Zetterlund
Boqvist-Suter-Mercer
Palat-Lazar-Cotter

That group would’ve never fallen off a cliff like ours did. Would’ve carried you to the TDL where you could’ve added a legit top 6er

Tracing back to Suter/Bo and the combined 2.375, Tatar/Nate/Mac combine for 4.3… I also never wanted to include Zetts in a Timo deal. I always felt we probably could’ve gotten away with Yegor in that deal instead. Suter/Bo/Zetts is 3.825 combined. Swap those trios and the depth looks gooood

Dillon deal also made it hard to do what was necessary up front with the limited cap room. I wanted to go with a cheap option there. Up front I wanted to overload the depth rather add a legit top 6er since that would’ve hamstrung our ability to fix the depth.

Fitz overcorrected so hard towards grrrrrrrit and defense. Completely flipped the identity of the team this past summer. Somehow despite doing that he thought the offense would be great and said goalscoring would be fine. Anyone paying attention should’ve recognized how bad the forward group was

I’ve been saying for a while you can trace a lot of our current problems back to 2023 summer letting forward depth wither. It was a huge main strengths of 22-23. Then was a problem for 23-24 and a bigger problem for 24-25. Letting Bo go and not signing Suter made no sense. Only 2.375 combined too

What a fucking loser