If the Sharks aren’t going to throw silly money at Raddysh(who I’m pretty sure is re-signing with Tampa), I’m thinking they should wait another year to commit long term to any defensemen. What I don’t want to see is the Sharks top prospects and first round picks go for guys that aren’t much better than Ferraro. Imagine letting Ferraro walk then giving up Musty and Edmonton’s first for Kesselring and then committing to him for 5 years. At that price might as well keep our prospects and picks and just commit to Ferraro for the 5. I acknowledge Kesselring is probably better, but he isn’t moving the needle. Let’s just sign the next Orlov to a two year deal and save our picks and prospects for when a top tier guy becomes available. We can probably take Hamilton as a cap dump, and we could role out:
Orlov & Hamilton
Muk & Deharnais
Dick & Pohl
Cags & best free agent willing to sign for 2 years
This is a very young D-core and probably won’t get the job done, but it will be fun to watch and I think you got to take the chance. There will be some team that was supposed to contend that will have 5 wins in the first 20 games and their star Defenseman will request a trade(Q.Hughes last year). When that happens I don’t want us to have used up all our trade capitol on some middle pairing guy.