This one is going to require an awful lot of thought, faith and waiting.
As already noted, Forsberg doesn't immediately fix our 'you must have 3 goalies under contract on July 1st' situation (has anyone figured out if that is BY THE END OF THE DAY ON JULY 1ST?) Oh, and as JB correctly noted, Forsberg sucks. He's no better than a dozen other RFA goalies kicking around the league. Gustav Forsling is a #7 Dman on his best day. He is not even close to a replacement for de Haan.
So what did we actually do here? We dumped Calvin de Haan's 4.5 million salary and cap hit, that is what we did. This is almost the opposite of the trades we are used to making with Chicago. De Haan was the dump, Saarela was the sweetener. Forsberg and Forsling are just noise. Kahuna is correct to speculate on whether we even qualify Forsberg. Forsling I would expect we would sign to a 2 way deal just for depth. Forsberg is at least NHL experienced, so he can be sold as a useful #3 (if Ned is with the Canes) or a #4. I THINK that we are going to keep Forsberg and he will be our #3 goalie, splitting time with Booth in Charlotte. I think this move solidifies Ned as being with the Canes next season. Is that smart? Probably not, depends on who the TBD other Canes goalie is.
But mostly this is a salary dump. Why would we do this? To offset the money spent on buying that first round pick from Toronto? Are we reducing payroll because Aho is going to get $7 million per and Dundon doesn't want to pay out over a set amount of money in payroll? Are we reducing payroll to allow us to both pay Aho AND make a big offer to Matt Duchene? If not Duchene, are we going to go all rogue and offer sheet Patrick Laine, or Mitch Marner, or Brayden Point and that 1st round pick acquisition was our effort to offset potentially losing our 1st round pick next season if the other team doesn't match? Maybe UFAs other than Matt Duchene (Marcus Johansson?)
Could be ANY of those things, from doing things on the cheap to freeing up some money for us to go after legit top 6 scoring talent. Right now we don't know squat about what is really going on and what the plan is. I will close with this...if you are going to dump Calvin de Haan like this, you sure as heck better tread carefully with trading Justin Faulk for a forward. Yeah, we have some organizational depth on D, but we just traded one of our top 6 away, our #6 is going to likely miss part of the season and we are talking about trading away one of our top 4 for a forward. Sorry, but Haydn Fleury, Jake Bean, Trevor Carrick, Rowand McKeown and Gustav Forsling are hardly going to step right in to the spots that were occupied by Calvin de Haan, Justin Faulk, and TVR this past season without a serious downgrade in effectiveness.
We can only hope that there is a lot more coming here and that this wasn't just a salary dump to keep our payroll low. We will have to wait and see what Dundon and Waddell have in mind here.
Oh, and media won't be waiting....they are going to grill us tomorrow about being cheap.