Monthly Archives: March 2011

Buyout of Mike Bibby

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This is a piece of unexpected and positive news for our franchise.

I am not surprised that this vet player wants to play right now for a contender and was willing to walk away from a lot of money. David Falk is a tough negotiator and is always hyper-supportive of his player and negotiated this deal with Ernie Grunfeld. He will land Mike with a contending team I am sure.

Our buyout allows the player to essentially be a free agent and go play where ever he wants this season.

But it allows us to get cap space for next season. And save a lot of payroll dollars.

We can treat the trade like it is an expiring contract and it also allows us to play our young players even more this season in the remaining 20 games or so.

A win/win for us and for Mike Bibby.

The Kirk Hinrich trade is a gift that keeps on giving for us.

Change – Lots of Change

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We have added many new players this year to our lineup for the Washington Capitals, some young and some veterans. Some via call ups; some via the amateur draft; and some via trades.We added Scott Hannan earlier in the year via trade.

And over the last 24 hours we added Marco Sturm, Dennis Wideman and Jason Arnott to the lineup.

All of these players are seasoned vets and playoff tested.

That is a lot of change. As promised.

We had to give up some value for Scott Hannan as we shipped off a fine young player in return. We miss Tomas but Scott has turned into a very steady and dependable blue liner for us. He is very solid in the room as well.

We got Marco Sturm off the waiver wire from LA. He is a consistent 20 goal scorer. I have a good vibe about this move.

We traded a prospect and a third round pick to get Dennis Wideman. He can play solid D; is quite mobile; and is very effective on the power play.

And for Jason Arnott we had to trade a vet player from our line up plus a second round pick. Jason is a battle tested big center who has played very well in the biggest games imaginable. I will miss David Steckel very much but to get value you have to trade some value back.

However we stayed on our strategy. We didn’t trade any of our highly valued and vaunted prospects and we didn’t trade our first round pick in next year’s draft. We added to the lineup at the deadline. We added vets as promised.

Kudos to our front office. They did a great job in adding to the team. Onward now for the last 19 games of the season. Let us all hope that change is good! Let us all believe this is change we can believe in. Go Caps!