Havlat had a pulled groin.
There is one big wild card that works in the sharks favor with the cap reduction:
There are a whole slew of teams that are cap strapped and will have sufficient trouble just resigning their own RFAs. There are also no top pairing Dmen on the UFA market. Why are these two facts so helpful? Because there will be a big market for boyle, and any team that gets him will have to eat his 6.7M salary and will unlikely be shopping much in the UFA market, but that would give the sharks over 14M in cap space with NO major RFA's to resign.
In other words, the number of teams bidding for UFA's this year will be far less and the salaries they can throw at them will be less. Trading boyle gives one less team to compete with, hopefully gets a very nice return, and gives the sharks a ton of space to land some of the top UFA's. I think this is the one year where dougie could be aggressive in signing UFA's to long term deals at good cap numbers if he plays his cards right.
Torres at 2.5M, Clarkson at 3M, Raymond also 3M, Stalberg 3M, Bickell or Fullpula 3M. Thats 14.5M for 5 top 9 forwards and would fit with a havlat buyout if dougie chose that route. All deals between 2-4 years. The D would be thin and we might have to see if a doherty, abelshuser, acolatse or the like can compete for a spot, but that could aid in creating a solid young D for the future and all of those UFAs aside from torres are in their 20's, so they should be good for at least 3-5 more years.
Top 9 Forwards would be:
Thornton, Marleau, pavelski, couture, stalberg, clarkson, torres, Raymond, and Bickell. Can fill it out with galiardi, desi, gomez and shep as the 13 forwards on the roster, which provides nice depth in case of injury or suspension.
Thornton-Stalberg-Bickell (3 biiiig bodies who can grind cycle and score with the two hawks)
Couture-Marleau-Torres (speed line with Torres as protection to do the dirty work)
Pavelski-Clarkson-Raymond (toughness and grit with some scoring punch---> This is a very good 3rd line)
Gomez-Galiardi-Desi (solid 4th line, though not much for production likely)
Burns would return to play D and the corps would be:
Vlasic-Burns
Stuart-Irwin
Hannan (resigns at 1M)-Braun
Demers
Obviously, it would be rough to lose boyle and would make an opportunity for the sharks to bring in some rooks to see what they can do. I like that roster, personally, and I think the scoring depth with galiardi able to jump back into the top 9 as needed would make the sharks hard to handle.
The lack of a third line obviously hurt the team, so they could parlay boyle into multiple key pieces for the future and use their cap leverage to land some solid UFA's as respectable prices.
I can see Boyle being moved, but not PattyJo. Fans will not re-new tickets if those two are traded. It's a business, first and foremost and trading those two will make a lot of season ticket holders unhappy, but I do agree that trading those two would be a HUGE step towards injecting some young talent into the prospect pool.
I hope that Doug can find the right balance in planning for the future, and being competitive in 13-14.
Season ticket holders had to already pay up, so that's a non factor.
Havlat had a pulled groin.