How much was Halak going to get anyway?

Using the AHL-NHL equivalencies, and hearing he had a mononucleosis sometimes in the season (not sure about that tough), I like this Eller fella more and more. Two more years on his entry-level deal, too…

Isn’t this a perfect case to take to arbitration? I can’t believe he’d find a lot of comps north of $2.5MM who he could use. Friedman suggests Lehtonen, which doesn’t really make sense to me.

Jesus, I love this site. I spent probably half an hour perusing the HF reaction thread, and I don’t think I saw a single person saying that this deal is anything less than a solid win for the Blues.

As for Denmark, I dunno how facetious you’re being, but any country that comes up with Frans Nielsen is fine by me.

I have to admit I’m pretty wary about this deal. I don’t feel its worth trading assets for a goaltender when we could simply sign Chris Mason for another two years at a similar cap hit and still get good production.

I suppose it’s likely Halak is a little bit better than Mason, but at the cost of giving up the assets we did when Eller can slot into the lineup as soon as next season that difference doesn’t seem like much.

Of course there is also the possibility that Halak is actually a complete monster and continues to improve and plays as one of the top goalies in the league. The Blues have struggled to find a goaltender to take care of them for the long term ever since the end of the Cujo era, so having a young solid guy we can lock up long term is very appealing to most fans. I really hope that Halak is that guy because I don’t want to see all the patience we’ve had waiting for our kids to develop wasted because of a sunk cost at the most important position.

TSN has a link up with a recording of an interview with Pierre Gauthier on the reasons for the trade. It sounds like their mgt team made the same assessments of player value as was made here (he even mentions Carey Price having played 150 NHL games plus a number of playoff games, plus rookie of the year at the AHL). The long and the short of it was “Older players are too expensive. You can’t win stanley cups without young players who outplay their cap hit — see Chicago.” Unsurprisingly, he also reports that every GM knows exactly what the cap situation is on every other team, so you don’t even need to tell teams that you are willing to trade a player.

The question that comes to my mind, also thinking of Tyler Dellow’s excellent post “Fortune Favours the Bold,” is whether a general economic rebound, which presumably will lead to faster increases in revenues and thus in the salary cap, changes this thinking at all. That is, if there is a (low escrow) rise in the rate of increase of the salary cap, will some of the long term contracts (like Richards, OV, Luongo, maybe Hossa) suddenly become (even) more worthwhile? Perhaps such contracts would even start to be as worthwhile as an entry-level player who can outscore at 5v5, playing reasonably hard minutes.

So, in other words, thinking in Dellow’s terms of “betting” on the future, is Gauthier implicitly betting that there will be even growth in the salary cap over the next 5-7 years such that it isn’t worth signing a mid-20s goalie to a long term deal? (I realize that Price might still be a better option in most scenarios of economic growth.)