Lowe Blow

In the new NHL with the salary cap, and free agency being an option for younger players, there have been an ever increasing amount of interesting offers to restricted free agents, two of which have come from Edmonton Oilers GM Kevin Lowe. He offered a whopping $51million to Thomas Vanek of the Buffalo Sabers who subsequently offered up the dough and signed Vanek. Darcy Regher had already lost Daniel Briere and Chris Drury and wasn't about to let another star player escape, but he was less than impressed by Lowe's tactic and had a few choice words for him. Yesterday, Kevin Lowe tendered an offer to Dustin Penner of the Stanley Cup Champion (sigh...) Ducks of Anaheim. This time he is going to cross paths with Brian Burke, a man know to be honest to the point of rudeness. So how do you think Mr. Burke will react? Well, we will have to wait and see but odds are he will not be overly impressed. The offer wasn't quite as dramatic as the one tendered to Vanek but was for a good sum nonetheless, and as such it seems like Burke is trying to buy a team. Well, he needs to. He has not done a good job of holding on to players or creating an environment where they want to play, thank you very much Chris Pronger, and so he is doing what he feels is necessary to put a winning team on the ice. I hope he does. While it is kind of an unfortunate way to have to go about it, money is his asset, he has some to spend so he is trying to make good use of it. Plain and Simple. Regher can cry until the cows come home, but if he had any brains he wouldn't have lost TWO star players. We would all try to make our team better and this is how he has gone about it, not the most classy thing to do but effective in driving up salaries...huhn, should have thought that through a little more, but at least he realizes money talks. And love him or hate him, he has spoke up.