Quoting: A_K
I would genuinely pay double their buy outs to have them play for another team. When you consider how lousy they are and how much strain they put on their partners, they ruin what would be a pretty good team. I don't think Army will buy out either but as we saw last offseason w/ the NTCs he really has no other way to transform the D.
Would this be a pretty good team though?
We have 4 guys playing at over a .5ppg mark. Thomas has been extremely good this season, he's played matchups and has produced offensively. Buch is Buch. Kyrou is barely over .5ppg, Schenn is also barely at it.
As much as we have issues on the backend and probably some of our scoring issues comes from poor breakout passes it's hard not to overlook our glaring hole of secondary scoring. Now alot of the lower point totals can be accounted for due to our anemic PP. But as of right now we really only have 4 top 6 players and Schenn is pretty borderline there at the moment (more or less shouldn't be a key cog of a line).
Proposing buyouts would help with clearing cap space for the next couple of years but it also handcuffs you down the line.
I don't think Krug drags down Faulk. Tbh I don't think Faulk is that good defensively. He has some ability to play in his own zone, but too often he gets caught over anticipating or not seeing a play. Krug certainly doesn't help/ but i wouldn't say he's the sole root of that d pair giving up alot of chances with heavily sheltered minutes.
I will agree with you that Leddy drags down Parayko. It seems like 75% of the goals against that pair are as a result of Colt trying to cover for Leddy. It's extremely tough deployment regardless, I think if you slotted him in with Faulk you'll see much better results and wont have to shelter that pair as much easing the burden on a Parayko pair.
TLDR: We aren't a pretty good team. We have good goaltending that was red hot at the beginning of the season. We have some pieces. But we have alot of holes that aren't ready to be adressed in the next year or two do to lack of cap, and lack of players nipping at the heels to get into the spots. There's no reason to spread out the pain versus just staying the course until we can fix the problem currectly.