I've been too focused on other things to rightly look at the Flames ridiculous cap situation recently. You know, the one that has caused the club to send a viable NHLer in Dustin Boyd down to the farm and play with less than a full compliment of players during a fight for the NW division down the stretch drive.
Thankfully, Tom Benjamin takes Sutter to task for his questionable cap management. The best bit:
I thought Sutter was wrong to trade for Jokinen even before this fiasco unfolded. I think it was more wrong today because I think making sure the team has enough money to ice a full team is a fundamental for any GM.
I'll add that some of us saw this coming in October in the wake of the Warrener/Boyd affair. In fact, I disliked the Flames cap position even before the year started.
Myself, I dont think carrying a large amount of cap space is a good idea. If you can reasonably spend a lot of money to build a team, you should. That said, part of managing the cap is establishing and maintaining at least a minimal buffer that will allow you to make big trades or suffer through a rash of injuries (or both) if need be. Sutter failed in this aspect this season and it's hurting the team down the stretch.
The Flames budgetary circumstances would be defensible if Calgary was getting value out of their bloated-cap roster, but, sadly, that's not the case: there are at least 4 highly suspect contracts on this club that are either entirely needless (Warrener, Roy), or grossly inflated (Vandermeer, Primeau).
Darryl needs to get this house in order his off-season. Things will be even tighter next year seeing as the Flames have 14 players signed for nearly $46M. A lot of his problems go away (Warrener, Aucoin) but that won't stop him from making new ones if nothings been learned from this year.
