People have said they won’t be able to keep Zach Parise if they sign Ilya Kovalchuk, but I don’t see that at all. I’m not an expert on the ins-and-outs of the Devils‘ roster — who must stay, who can be dealt, who must be re-signed; all that stuff that a team’s fans know better than outsiders — but just looking at the numbers for the next two years, they can:
- Sign Kovalchuk with a $7.5MM cap hit and get under the cap by dumping one big contract (Travis Zajac?).
- Sign Parise with a cap hit of $7MM (starting 2011-2012) and get under the cap for 2011-12 simply by letting Jamie Langenbrunner and Jason Arnott (both UFAs) walk. They might have to do some minor shuffling (e.g. to get more $600K contracts in there to replace some $900K ones). But that’s not too shabby.