I take it back, actually; the Blackhawks are still in a particularly unpleasant level of salary cap hell. Here are their lines, with cap numbers (* indicating a restricted free agent):
Toews ($6.3 million) / Kane ($6.3 million) / Hossa ($5.275 million)
Sharp ($3.9 million) / Bolland ($3.375 million) / Versteeg ($3.083 million)
*Skille ($1.275 million) / Kopecky ($1.2 million) / Beach ($1.171 million)
Reasoner ($1.15 million) / Brouwer ($1.025 million) / *Bickell ($0.650m)
And the defensive pairings:
Campbell ($7.143 million) (
) / Keith ($5.538 million)
Seabrook ($3.5 million) / *Hjalmarsson ($2.75 million)
Connelly ($0.875 million) / * Hendry ($0.7 million)
Goalies:
Huet buyout ($2.813 million) or stuff him in the minors / *Niemi ($2.750m) / Corey Crawford ($0.8 million)
So, if my math is correct (and there's no guarantee of this:
The roster has 21 people at the moment, the cap is going to be $59.4 million, and the current payroll is $61.574 million. They also have another $4+ million in cap damage, due to Toews and Kane hitting all their ELC bonuses (and Toews' $1.3 million bonus for winning the Conn Smythe). So they still need to dump about $5.6 million. Assuming they sign a few more players to replace trades and to fill the roster, and do so at about $3 million, they need to dump about $8.6 million in salary.
This means that, most likely, Versteeg is a goner and Sharp is probably on the block, too. They'll probably dump Skille and go cheaper there, too. $350,000 from Beach's contract is a bonus and can be deferred, since the NHLPA extended the CBA, so he's still a bargain. And they're still over by a bit, so someone else'll have to be traded, or they'll have to let Hjalmarsson go.
It's all moot if they can somehow dupe some poor bastard into taking Huet (is Glen Sather drunk yet?) and if they can dump Campbell for a bag of pucks, because that solves almost all the problems in the world. (Outside of the fact that they're going to have to give Niemi a horribly over-inflated contract to get him to sign, and it's a contract that he absolutely does not deserve.)
God, I want to take Dale Tallon out behind a barn and shoot him in the head. If he hadn't
completely fucked the dog with last summer's offer sheet disaster (and if he hadn't signed Huet and Campbell to utterly indefensible contracts), the team would have no offseason worries this summer. Yeah, Tallon made some great moves (getting Versteeg and Sharp, notably), but,
fuck, he left a mess of the team's accounting in his wake.
