@littlejerryseinfeld what am I missing here? They have the cap space and no notable UFA/RFAs that need to be kept.

You resigned zero ufa or rfas and cheaped out everywhere to make it fit

As I said in your other thread, doesn't matter if they can technically afford it, the deal is DOA for a 34 year old Anders Lee making 7M for two more years. That's purely a waste of money. The team is better off keeping Gaudreau and using the 4.9M difference to add someone else.

There is nobody notable that needs to be kept, and you could still go up another couple hundred thousand each. I was not wrong in saying the team fit. You said it would be an 18 man roster...

The gap between higher cap/lower term and lower cap/higher term is not close enough to me for Minny to accept. 7M over 2 years is WAYYYY worse than 2.1 over 4 more years. I don't think either team is too worried about actual salaries here. Its just the cap difference is too monumental.

Lee's contract is a burden. Gaudreau's is an annoyance.

You're right it would fit next year, but have fun in 2025/26 extending Faber, Rossi, Khusnutdinov, and Wallstedt while ideally locking up at least 2 of them long-term and either giving Middleton a raise or finding a replacement top 4 LHD and filling out the rest of the roster to be competitive enough to convince Kaprizov to extend.

$14m buyout dead cap comes off the books.

Which doesn't magically solve all their cap requirements. They'll have ~$40m to work with in your hypothetical scenario and need to sign 11 or 12 players. If Faber keeps it up, he could very well eat up around 1/4 of that on an 8 year deal and they'll still need to figure out a top 6 center to play with JEEK and a LHD to play with Spurgeon on the 2nd pair so that's possibly another 1/3 of that and the other ~$15m + whatever the cap goes up by will go towards the remaining 8 or 9 players which ideally won't all be league minimum plugs. I'd much rather they do that then throw away ~$5m on an aging vet that is only going to decline further.

Gaudreau isn't a problem. He's either the 4C or buried in the minors with under $1m in dead cap. That's nothing. But you already know how stupid this deal would be for the Wild, which is why you'd like to see it as an Islanders fan.