By having him on the team, you’re essentially giving us two grinding lines. Assuming that you want Helm and Eaves to play on an energy line, you can either have Drapes or Abby maybe on that wing. But that means one of those 2 are playing on another line.

Do you put Cleary with Helm and Eaves and make that your third line? That makes it a bit more offensive.

Then you can put Draper-Abby-Miller on your 4th. Not bad. Adding Miller gives us 12. The 13th forward would play on one of our top 2 lines:

(For simplicity)
Zetterberg-Datsyuk-Holmstrom
Franzen-Filppula-__________
Cleary-Helm-Eaves
Draper-Abby-Miller
Ritola

Who’s that 13th forward? Bert has done enough to warrant a contract. Williams provides a RH shot and a Power Play QB. We can’t have both next year unless we want to drop Miller. I’d find that hard to do given his play this year.

By dropping both Bert and Willy, we have $3M to spend. There’s also Leino who’s signed to an $800K contract. So, that’s $3.8M if we lose him. Based on my forecast (Lidas @ 4.5M, Homer @ 1.5, Helm @ 1.2, Miller at $600K, and Eaves @ 1M), we should have $52M committed to 2 goalies, 7 d-men, and 12 forwards, giving us ~4M to spend on a top-6 forward if we wanted to max out our cap situation.

What if Hudler comes back? He’d be our 2nd liner.

I have a feeling Brunnstrom will be available if we wanted to go that route. Not sure if it’s worth it over Bert or Willy. Definitely has more speed than both though. I really like Hagman and his cap hit ($3M). But I don’t think it’d be worth trying to get him out of Calgary.

What are your thoughts?

Pavel Datsyuk ($6.700m) / Henrik Zetterberg ($6.083m) / Johan Franzen ($3.955m)
Valtteri Filppula ($3.000m) / Daniel Cleary ($2.800m) / Kris Draper ($1.583m)
* Tomas Holmstrom ($1.500m) / * Darren Helm ($1.200m) / * Patrick Eaves ($1.000m)
* Justin Abdelkader ($0.850m) / * Drew Miller ($0.600m) / * Mattias Ritola ($0.511m)

Brian Rafalski ($6.000m) / * Nicklas Lidstrom ($4.500m)
Brad Stuart ($3.750m) / Niklas Kronwall ($3.000m)
* Andreas Lilja ($1.250m) / Jonathan Ericsson ($0.900m)
Jakub Kindl ($0.883m)

GOALTENDERS
Chris Osgood ($1.417m) / Jimmy Howard ($0.717m)

CAPGEEK.COM TOTALS
ROSTER: 21; PAYROLL: $52.199m; CAP ROOM: $4.601m BONUSES: $0.000m