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I think it makes some sense in as much as if he's not 100% sold on coming back to the Leafs he could sign a below-market 2 year deal to really give the current core group one last go-round with a bit more cap flexibility and then, at 29, get to negotiate a big 3rd deal while still on the right...

I mean, for starters, 30-37 is an 8 year deal, not a 7 year deal but more to the point there seems to be a couple issues with how you're figuring things. One, Matthews is a year older than you have him. He's turning 26 before this season begins so his new contract will cover the years 27+ which...

Obviously I could be wrong but I really don't think Matthews pushes the salary structure that much. I think he gets somewhere between 12.75 and 13.5 so he can comfortably call himself the highest paid in the game but the idea he gets up to 14 or 15 seems unlikely to me.

Given the speed at which the Pittsburgh deal got done it's pretty safe to assume that his agent had gauged the market for what was out there for him if the Leafs moved on. That seems like pretty reasonable agent-type behavior. Especially considering there was a lot of talk that the Leafs would...

Nobody? I'm suggesting that Spezza leaving was a consequence of Dubas leaving. What I'm not seeing is why that makes Dubas leaving a foregone conclusion. Right, the key word there being "if". He probably knew the Penguins were interested, used that as leverage in his negotiations with the...

He had what in his back pocket? Dubas didn't have a contract. If he didn't want to come back to the Leafs he didn't have to do anything but say so.

I'm still not following. Spezza was Dubas' guy so if Dubas left Spezza was going to go with. How does that support the notion that it was predetermined? That a possible outcome has predictable consequences doesn't mean that the outcome is a sure thing.

How does it do that? Spezza was clearly Dubas' guy so when Dubas left it made sense that Spezza would go too just like guys on Nick Nurse's staff have joined him at his new job. I'm not sure what that actually says about the circumstances of his departure.

I could be wrong but those seem to be hand in hand here. Like at least some of those deals were the Knights taking on sketchy contracts for picks, right? I'm not trying to knock what they did or anything but putting a team down in a league with a super restrictive hard cap and give them a...

That said, it's a lot easier to be shrewd when you have the cap flexibility they did.

While they obviously got some very friendly expansion draft rules there's really no way to prevent an expansion team from becoming pretty competitive instantly just because of the realities of the cap. Having to spend to the minimum(and most expansion owners will be eager to not just spend the...

Well, there we go. Another disappointing hockey season. A cup won by a team I'm almost entirely indifferent to. But next year, hoo baby, next year will be the one.

Can't imagine a lot of people would have picked Eichel to win a cup before McDavid.

I think you could more fairly call it an amazing run if it didn't basically happen every other year now. Montreal in the covid year, Dallas in 2020, the Preds in 2017. I mean, at some point low seeds going deep in the playoffs just becomes a thing that happens.

If anyone knew that Travis Konecny was going to become Travis Konecny, he wouldn't have been available at #26 to begin with. It's mainly guesswork for the most part and even if the Leafs had liked Travis Konecny a ton at the time, they wouldn't have traded down. There's really no way to make...

Oh my god. Does this mean that the Panthers success wasn't about some sort of supernatural level of toughness and competitive spirit but was actually just a fairly ordinary team who got a run of unsustainably hot goaltending? And that without that level of play in net they'd look just as...

I think with some of these teams the social cache of owning them is so great that it almost doesn't matter what they're worth. For anyone to sell them they'd be signing up from going from a very wealthy and important/powerful/famous person to being a wealthier unknown. That seems pretty unlikely...

Well, the thing with Grantland was it was always a Simmons vanity project. Something they gave him because he was a big earner for them and they wanted to keep him happy. I don't think it was ever going to be profitable. It didn't die because Simmons or the site became less popular, it died...

He has to come back next year just to get the 8 points, right? Get the 8 points, make the HHOF, ride off into the sunset on a giant hot dog.