This would be like the Sens trading Norris for Dylan Peterson and two 2nds.

How much to acquire him? Doesn't STL not have enough cap space to sign him?
Norris is a 1C, 87th %ile in WAR, 1 point off leading the team. Thomas is good but plays with better players and came off a weak season. Not the best comparison. I get your point tho lol

Honestly, y'all should just offer sheet him for $4M if you really want him. I would not be happy with that outcome, though.

Norris was the 1C and played really well. That meant that he also got a ton of PP minutes to feast on. At 5v5 Thomas had 12 pts in 33 GP (380 TOI) vs Norris 19 pts in 56 GP (730 TOI). In 2019-20, Thomas was 2 pts off the team lead in 5v5 scoring behind ROR who played about 200 more minutes. His weak season was really just broken up with injuries and stuck in a limited role.

Sundqvist on LTIR for the first 10 or so games buys them some time if they can come to an agreement in the 2-3m range. Really, if they run 22 guys they can squeeze him in on a 1x2.5 deal and pay him next year. Not sure why they didn't get Thomas' contract done first, he's probably the most important Blues player for the next decade. Army seems to have a difficult time handing out money in the correct order (and to the correct guys in some cases).

Yeah the offer sheet would be the only way to get it done. And tbh it would be cheaper and easier for OTT. For whatever reason, nobody has forced the Blues hand, thankfully.

The problem is STL wants to sign this guy too. If the contract you're offering is what will get him to sign, STL would have signed him already. He wants more and is using his leverage of not playing to get it. He'd use that same leverage against Ottawa except now he knows you just traded a bunch of assets to get him, so all the more reason to believe Ott will give into his demands.

Unless I missed something, I think the only impasse right now with STL and Thomas is money. So to truly get Thomas, you have to OS him enough so that STL just can't match (See KK OS as an example). Trading for Thomas just means you'd either have to pay the equivalent of an OS compensation or MORE, to get STL to bite and then still have to pay him more than he's worth. 3M+

Also just to put things into perspective, STL can technically match this offer above of 2.8M and still ice a full team with 1 extra. So the offer has to be north of 3M to even get them to sweat. Which probably means that Thomas's camp is looking for well over 3M.

Not to mention that the "sweat" in this case is probably just trading a guy like Sanford (2m) or Barbashev (2.25m) to come up with the extra money. Might get nothing but future considerations since they'd be in a tough spot, but I can't see a situation where they lose Thomas. Maybe I just love the kid too much.

I agree but remember, not many teams have cap space to just add a 2M guy right before camp right now, not many teams with cap space are interested in adding more salary when they know they're bottom feeders anyway and in the event STL needs to cut cap, time is ticking for them to do something before the start of the year. The few teams who have space andd the want for the player may up the price because they know STL is desperate. Not to mention that trading Sanford away, you'll still need to replace him with a minimum 750K cap. So the cap savings even with nothing coming back is actually only 1.5M. Hopefully that's enough to accommodate Thomas.

I know we all tend to play it off easily but trading without obstacles is hard enough, throw in a bunch of other factors to "force" a deal to HAVE to happen is much much harder to do than "just trading a guy". Before the pandemic, GM's were more willing to help each other but the new financial constraints have changed the game quite a bit IMO.

Outside of Montreal with Point and Aho, which teams have tabled offer sheets in recent years?

The last one was the Flames to Ryan O'Reilly in 2013

Carolina's retaliation was a clear message that nobody wants it to happen anymore