NHL.COM: At what point did you realize you had to trade Carter and Richards to create enough cap space to sign Bryzgalov? Could you have just moved one?
HOLMGREN: I think we probably could have done it by keeping them both, too. It just got to the point where some things that came up that looked good for us, that we liked now and liked down the road. The process, the things we were looking at, piecing it together. It's going to be a different team. We changed our whole thing; we changed our philosophy, basically, with allocating dollars to that position. We haven't done that in a while. With that came these other things.
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NHL.COM: With all Couturier has already accomplished in junior hockey, does that make it ineffective to send him back to his junior team in Drummondville? Or would it be better for him to be there, as a top-line player, rather than a third-line player in the NHL?
HOLMGREN: At the end of the day, I think we'll do what's right for Sean and right for the organization. We're not going to force him into something we don't think he's ready for. We'll see how it goes. Ultimately the players answer all those questions.
Well since Homer has now said it himself that we could have kept both Richards and Carter, it sounds to me like they got the best returns they could by trading them as opposed to others. But the fact remains that he didn't HAVE to trade them to sign Bryzgalov. I think most of us already knew this but we now have proof in the pudding lol...
