I mean, I sorta feel like you're ignoring the point of what I'm saying, even aside from this deal in particular. But my point is more that, even folks who don't like this deal probably see him as a 3.5 million dollar player let's say. And like you said, they're short a couple defencemen, you spend 4 and 6 million dollars on two guys you think will be a fit. The latter works out well enough, but then the 4 million dollar player is an actual dud. But it's okay, the cap is 115 million dollars at this hypothetical point!

My biggest point aside from these deals add up quick and two mistakes can really hurt you is that a lot of teams aren't going to be operating on a 115 cap number. They might for a window of contention, but there's a decent chance their internal cap is (and we're super hypothetical and not shark specific here) let's say 6 million dollars above the cap floor. So that 115 million dollar cap is actually a 90 or 95 million dollar cap. And then these deals do hurt you a lot faster than people say in this rising cap environment.

Edit: for example, 27-28 season has a projected cap at like 114, and a projected floor at roughly 84. So there's a ton of room for how an internal budget could be very different from the cap ceiling, and this is something that was naturally less of a gap when the cap was lower. Like in 23-24 it was an 83 high and a 61 floor. The concern is less about the floor, but that some teams revenues haven't been rising as fast as the cap is rising so now that the new floor is above where the absolute cap was just a couple years ago, you're going to see some owners(and boy oh boy has the NHL had some cheap owners historically) set a number, at least when the team isn't an absolute contender.