Right after I made that last post, the salary cap for 07-08 was announced. It's gonna be $50.3 million for next season, which is at the high end of previous estimates. That means the Stars have a little over $8 million to spend. With that figure, we could get pretty much any player we wanted. It also completely throws off my free agency post, since I was working under the assumption (and you know what happens when you assume) that we were going to have to worry about the cap. This gives us a lot of headroom to work with. Ryan Smyth is definitely not out of the equation now.
That makes Smyth, Drury, Briere, Gomez, and Yashin (in that order) my favorites in the FA pool. The idea of Kariya is also growing on me the more I think about it. I always liked him as a player, and he's got a couple years left in him.
Briere would be higher on that list, but he just turned down a 5-year, $25 million offer from Buffalo. The Stars probably wouldn't want to offer him that many years, so he would want more per year. That means upwards of $6 mil per year for him, which is a little steep. On the other hand, he would definitely give our team a top-tier scoring threat.
In any case, the Stars would almost certainly have a couple million in cap space if we felt a need somewhere or wanted to trade up somewhere. That might be worth saving for the trade deadline, as long as we address our scoring problems before the season starts.
Free agency starts Sunday. I haven't heard any rumors involving the Stars, but let's hope they get involved.
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