Équipe: 2016-17 Penguins de Pittsburgh

Date de création initiale: 16 janv. 2016

Publié: 17 janv. 2016

Mode - plafond salarial: Basique

+FER DAH HIBBZ

+Let us imagine for a moment the impending doom that is the Olli Maata Offer Sheet of 2016. ("Pensocalypse"? "Apenscalypse"? Whatever.) In a world filled with uncertainty and erratic management, GMJR finally gets up the gumption to buy a player out (Kunitz), but then turns around and uses that money to re-sign Ben Lovejoy to an extension of his previous contract!

Meanwhile, Beau Bennett sita out the rest of this season because when he got the go ahead to play he laughed too hard and burst a lung; even so, GMJR sees fit to not only bring back, but to give him a 75% raise. And Sergei Plotnikov, having still not scored a goal in the NHL, gets himself a shiny new contract to match Beau's! "You gotta give these young kids a chance," GMJR tells Rossi over sushi at their favorite Chinese restaurant. (Look, it's Pittsburgh... Just "roll" with it.)

And then comes the Offer Sheet. A bat out of hell. "A bolt of lightning from the blue," GMJR tells Rossi, handing him a fiver for his vanilla-chocolate twist cone (let's say there are even some nice big rainbow sprinkles! GMJR has quite the sweet tooth, but Rossi knows just how he likes it).

How could the Pen's possibly survive? Maata takes the offer (maybe Paul Holmgren penned it, somehow); can GMJR rise to the occasion? Will Pittsburgh still have a hockey team in 2017?

Okay, tired of writing this dithering nonsense: anyway, for Hibbits, $5M for Maata is doable; it just takes a bit of gumption. GMJR maybe fucks it up, maybe doesn't; who can say? He seems to go every which way at all times, so it's rather hard to tell.