Day 1: Trade
Day 2: Price announces his return
Day 3: ______?

As a team that doesn't hand out signing bonuses to even their best players, Ottawa declines.

Ottawa can't afford this financially

Yeah I’d do it

on which side? both?

Yeah both but especially Montreal

trading price definitely makes sense for MTL in a business pov, even if it means taking a "cap dump"

This is not interesting for Ottawa. Insurance only covers 80% of a contract AFAWK, Sens could already axed out in terms of contracts insured. There's also the 30 games period when the team is 100% responsible for the salary, does it have to happen every year? Price is still owed 23.5 M$, so just 20% is 4.7 M$ of dead cost.


There's much easier options for Ottawa to consider before doing this

1) Trade Kubalik for a pick. This is by far the most "no brainer" option. With Tarasenko signing, he's kind of redundant, he would struggle to get PP time (with 10-12 guys who also want PP time) and would walk for nothing at the end of the season (Sens will only have 1 Top-9 spot to fill in 2024-25 and they have to spend on replacing Tarasenko, ideally a better 2-way player). Mathieu Joseph is much better defensively, an Elite PKer and produces as much at ES (per minutes played)

2) if the GM is too stupid to do option #1, trade Joseph with retention. Retaining something like 0.95 AAV would put Joseph at 2.0 AAV on a rising cap as soon as next season, so he should easily be tradeable like that. He's a very useful bottom-6 forward. If you retain 50%, you could even get a decent asset/pick

3) trade Joseph WITH a pick (most likely a 2nd) for future considerations. This clears 2.95 AAV minus the player replacing his spot.

4) trade Brannstrom for a young forward still on ELC. You save enough to ink Pinto to a 1 year bridge. Sens can afford to trade Brannstrom with Kleven coming up. Although it would be safer to wait a little before doing that. Give half a season to Kleven in the AHL and give the opportunity to Brannstrom to continue raising his value, particularly if there's an injury


Something I dug regarding Joseph today :

Over the last 3 seasons, among the 519 forwards who played at least 500 ES minutes, Joseph ranks 273th with 1.64 Pts/60 (higher than Kubalik, Pageau, Granlund, Yamamoto, Wennberg, Laughton (lol), Hoffman, Perry, etc)

He is a defensive forward and PK specialist and yet produces like an average 8th/9th forward. Considering his worth is mainly on the defensive side of things, he's worth holding to and if he rebounds to 2021-22 form, he's actually valuable