I Can Get Behind Anything

I was sitting at work the other day, and I got a phone call from Kinger.

"Did you see?"
"What?"
"Oh god, you haven't seen it yet."
At this point I immediately pulled up tsn.ca and saw the lead story.
"Oh god no..."

I had spent the entire commercial/preview time at Transformers the night before explaining to my Flames/Pens sports bigamist friend that there was no way in hell Lowe was going to be stupid enough to give Souray the kind of money he wanted. That Lowe and Co. were too good at analyzing dmen to do something so clearly foolish. Desperation wouldn't overcome their good senses. But it did. At this point, Kinger has managed to talk me off the ledge and now I'm rationalizing the ways in which this is a good thing.

27/5 is less than I thought he was going to sign for originally. That's a little like putting your hand through a table saw and coming out the other side with your pinky intact, but it's still something.

Even if Souray's PP numbers regress to the mean somewhat, we should still be able to pencil him in for at least 15 goals and 25 assists. Now, that's still being reasonably optimistic, but that's what we're doing here.

Montreal was an incredibly bad ES team, overall. One hopes that this should deflate that +/- a bit, but based on the other information I've seen around the Oilogosphere, maybe not. However, when rationalizing something awful, picking your evidence selectively is critical. I don't really know that Souray is awful defensively. I think that he is. The statistical evidence suggests that he is, but I haven't seen enough of Montreal play to judge the context of those numbers. A friend of mine who is a Habs fan loves the guy, so there's something. It's enough to give me hope and some optimism. I'll let the puck drop for the 1st game before I decide that this is not going to work.

This doesn't completely cripple the team's budget. If Lowe gets Pitkanen signed to something long-term, that only leaves Stoll as a major re-signing for next offseason. Assume that his raise is covered by Tarnstrom walking and Gilbert likely getting his spot, then we have however much money we're willing to spend over where we are at now to upgrade on Sanderson. Based on the Vanek offer of 10 in the first season, that seems to be about 4 million real dollars. A 5.5 million dollar left winger would look like a good investment...

So that's the most optimism I can muster. It might not be all bad. Sadly, I'm getting pretty used to looking at this team's moves that way.