That's now been reported by several fairly reliable sources. The three are Nashville, Montreal and Carolina. I think he's shown a pretty strong preference for a smaller market in terms of his comfort level, but money will talk. Nashville probably has the edge in competitiveness and the market is right. They only have a certain amount of cap space though. They've got a fourth line to build from scratch and need to get Josi locked up to an extension if they want to avoid rolling the dice on him playing next year on the last year of his deal. Montreal, dunno, but the money would have to be a lot more than the other two because of the tax situation. Carolina would look like a good fit. We've got the cap space if we want to go fairly big, and we obviously need a first line center to take another step. The thing is, until Aho is settled we can't go around saying the Canes have oodles and oodles of cap space. We really don't. Aho and a goalie could well eat up $10-12 million out of $21 million available ... pending other moves.
Oh ... also, there's speculation from less great sources that Duchene is open to taking other meetings. So, we could be looking at more players at the table. I think he ends up in Nashville, but it's nice to be in the mix ... I guess. Duchene changed my mind a bit with his performance in Columbus. He battled hard in a system that really wasn't all that well suited for him, and was effective. That compete level wasn't what I'm used to seeing from him.
