This whole situation is like knowing your pal is absolutely hammered, but still letting him drive sober you home.

First off, you're not getting an eight year deal for Petey unless it averages in the 10 million dollar range. That's why he signed a three year deal.

Second, OK, so you have all that money to spend, who are you spending it on? They don't have a whole lot of assets to offer in trade, the prospect cupboard is pretty bare, and the FA list for next year isn't loaded with a whole lot of premier talent. And bear in mind, you always have to overpay for the best talent in the FA market, especially when you're a bad team.

Right now, you have two choices, and lamenting the past is not one of them. You either stick with this core and hope that Boudreau gets more out of them than Green, or you blow it up, making everyone but Hughes and Demko available, and load up on picks and prospects.

I do think this group is better than what it's shown and has underachieved, in a large degree to coaching. I think that if the new GM can find a way to add a legitimate top pairing RD to play with Hughes and a scoring 3C that can kill penalties, they'll be in pretty good shape. BUT. They have to find a way to do that without moving out any more top draft picks. These next two drafts are supposed to be deep ones and they need to take advantage of that.

For example...they pretty much have to trade one of Boeser, Miller or Horvat to get what they need to move forward in other areas. See if you can move one of them for another pick in the top half of this draft and go after either Nemec or Chesley, or a prospect from another club, like Braden Schneider. Use the cleared cap space to offer Letang a large dollar short term deal, say two years at 9 mil per, to shore up the top RD until the younger player can step into the position.

Now, if I trusted this team's scouting department, I wouldn't be opposed to them trading all the big pieces, save for Hughes and Demko, for as many low picks as they could gather over the next two drafts and rebuild. But I don't trust them. There have been too many Virtanen's, Gaudette's, Juolevi's and Klimovich's from this group. IMO, the first priority for the the new GM is a complete gut and overhaul of their scouting department. You build through the draft; you backfill with trades and FA signings.

That said, I wouldn't be opposed to a

yeah a rebuild would be ok but they have alot of players on good deals and fairly young, the only bad contracts are OEL and Myers, and the Hamonic deal worked out bad but who knew ahead of time. if you could dump those than you would be in decent shape for a retool