I think some of us (myself included) might be overthinking the roster puzzle. Let’s boil it down to who is overpaid?
No. 1 on my list is Cernak. He doesn’t score. He’s guaranteed to miss time every year with injuries. Sure, he’s a defensive beast. But I think we all saw how a guy like Niko Mikkola can provide the exact same thing at half the price. HOWEVER, I doubt JBB’s plan is to subtract from his top4 dmen now that he’s just gone to great lengths to reunite them.
No. 2 on my list is Cirelli. Who obviously doesn’t score enough to be worth his salary and is ideally a 3C. But my criticism comes with a caveat … he’s a playoff warrior. Intangibles galore. Very valuable even if he’s overpaid by a million or two. A Cup contender would snap him up in a trade in minutes. And for that same reason I just don’t think JBB wants to move him.
Clearly a lot of you would put Sergachev on this list, and I might be persuaded that he’s overpaid by maybe a million (at most). But he’s a young dman with 2 rings who can do and has done everything on the ice. Young dmen who can score at his level make a lot of money and don’t get traded very much if they can play defense with physicality and grit. Which he does. I get the critiques. We’ve all watched every minute of his career. But for the same reasons JBB probably keeps Cernak, he’ll want to keep Serge. It’s his team and this is his plan.
Jeannot is everybody’s whipping boy, but his salary really isn’t the problem. We haven’t seen him healthy for more than a quarter of a season. Call it ego, pride or stupidity, but I don’t think JBB trades him. I also think he’s one of the few bottom six guys we have who can actually impact the results of games. If he were only available for more of them.
And then there’s the mistake that is Connor Sheary. Anything over a minimum salary makes him overpaid. Yeah, he was hurt, but it’s hard to imagine the Bolts running it back. His track record before last year is good enough that we might be able to pay a team to trade for him. Something like Perbix, Sheary and a 2024 6th for a 2027 7th. Just get him off the roster.
That’s it. That’s the list. Unless JBB get someone to trade for Sheary AND gets a guy like Duclair to sign a below-market deal AND he Jedi mind tricks Stamkos into accepting an insanely low AAV, he’s just going to have to decide whether to trade Cernak, Cirelli or Sergachev.
