Love that trade for the Devils

Wow, where to even start?

1- Petro is not getting 7 x damn near 11 unless he is leaving, which he's almost certainly not. It will probably be a little over 9m.
2- We have no use whatsoever for Johnston, but even without him I doubt NYI does this trade. I'd happily take it though.
3- Big no thanks on Smith, especially for 2 years.
4- Senn is not needed in our pool, and though Studenic might be *mildly* interesting to us as a side addition, we are not giving a 2020 2nd to shed one year of Allen. The way he's corrected his game and is playing, someone will pay better than that to get him this summer.
5- Fair heads up: Including Foley in our cap hit is a dead giveaway that someone doesn't know what they're on about. The guy hasn't played in eons and is likely finished as a pro due to concussion issues.

I'm gonna guess that Petro comes in around the 9.25-9.75m mark. That opens up a little more cap room, maybe enough to keep Allen as the backup for the last year of his deal. I would hate to pay to move anyone, especially considering how solid Jake has been as the backup this season.

If Pietrangelo re-signs, we should try our best to move Faulk before any of these other guys. It's not personal, but he's analytically very bad and we're paying him a ton to play on the third pairing. He's also not necessary with Pietrangelo and Parayko there. IDK how to do that with his NTC though.

I'd like to keep Allen too, but for similar reasons it's not feasible to pay a backup goalie that much money. I'd also like to keep Bozak, who has some of the best defensive analytics in the league this year (and last, actually) and he seems to be doing great with Thomas. But I'd move them both if it meant keeping Pietrangelo.

Faulk has barely played on the 3rd pairing. He's mostly been paired with Petro, and they were friggin' dynamite together. They need to be put back together.

And actually, his analytic numbers are better than Parayko-J-Bo's (though obviously they always got the toughest matchups and were more often out there with the checking line). That's not to say he's played better than Parayko, but it shows that analytics always need context.

I 100% agree that analytics always need context, I constantly argue with people on here about Pietrangelo's defensive ability because so many of the stats lack context.

That said, I'd push back on "freakin dynamite" a bit in regards to Faulk and Pietrangelo. They were decent offensively but leaky defensively, averaging almost as many goals for/60 as goals against/60. Analytically speaking, Pietrangelo's best partner has been Dunn. They've got the highest expected goals for with the lowest expected goals against, and that's accounting for context. (A lot of the narrative is that we only use Dunn and Pietrangelo in the offensive zone, but Dunn's zone starts at even strength are about 50/50, and he's a tad above average defensively on the whole at 5v5, and Pietrangelo doesn't get a ton of defensive starts anyway). Dunn should be playing with Pietrangelo, which makes more sense anyway in a handedness sense, which would bump Faulk from that line.

No disrespect to him considering the cirumstances, but I was actually one of the few people who said we should have let Bouwmeester walk last offseason. I understood why we didn't and he really was excellent in the back half of last season and the playoffs. But he was just okay this year and analytically he's just been awful. Like even with the context of "he's always going against tough competition" it's pretty bad, and he drags down Parayko with him. So I'm not super impressed with most defensive pairings being better than them.

Again, not personal to him either, but Faulk is what he is- a mediocre to average defensive player who takes an inordinate amount of shots compared to everyone else while converting on a low amount of them, meaning a lot of time he gives up possession and he takes away shots from more skilled players who are often closer to the net than he is who can fire off shots that have a higher chance of going in. He's a third pairing defenseman, maybe second on a bad team, and there's a reason Carolina got rid of him. He's elite at nothing, and you don't sign players who are elite at nothing to seven year deals, especially at that money with NTC. Even if he was good, if we have Pietrangelo (which, I hope we do) and Parayko, it's the same argument as keeping Allen- this is a hard cap league, and you simply cannot afford to pay a backup goalie or a third pairing defenseman several millions of dollars.

Faulk has played almost a third of his minutes this year paired with Dunn or Gunnarsson, and I would qualify those as third pairing minutes. While it's not the majority, it's certainly more than barely. And he's actually ok on those pairings. Some of the rest has been with Pietrangelo, most of it is with Bouwmeester. And that pairing is very not good.