i love how everybody is calling lowe an idiot. Have you all forgotten the team he assembled to lead edmonton to the stanley cup finals? and lowe went after penner cause he saw potential in him and he added size to the team, something that edmonton desperatley needed. he isnt responsible for the players being overpaid either. the salary cap has made that happen with the minimum spending limit and the teams that want some impact players to improve their team. so stop blaming lowe already

Good assessment Troy. Saved me a lot of typing.lol

This is really simple. K-Lowe simply forced GM's to do their in house signings to give him more of a chance to land UFA's. Its no secret that not a lot of players want to play in E-town, but now with a new owner we have opened up some eyes around the league for future UFA's which will hopefully come to play here. Granted we were unable to land any UFA's but he all he did really was open certain GM's eyes and make them realize that what they have in house may be more valuable than what is available on the open market. Nobody held a gun to Regeir's head & told him he had to pay Vanek that money, he's been lowballing players for years in Buffalo. Just ask Briere, Drury or Campbell. He could have locked these guys up long term but chose not to because he was too cheap. The Vanek contract proved that Buffalo did have the $$ but didnt want to pay, whether they paid the right guy remains to be seen. That contract was a warning to other Gm's what K-Lowe was up to, Burke was sleeping & overpaid both Bertuzzi & Schneider prior to losing Penner. K-Lowe seen more potential in Penner than Burke had budgeted for him and he's an Oiler now. Burke wants to draw attention away from his own mistake & blame Lowe for a league wide problem, gimme a break. It's the GM's overall responsibility to do what he believes is right for HIS team to succeed, after all it is a salary cap era & every team has it's own CAP in which they live or die by. 10yrs ago the league was overpaying players for what they had done in the PAST. Now the teams are seemingly overpaying for what the players might do in the FUTURE. I'm no GM but I'd rather overpay for a players potential than overpay for diminishing skills.

BUrke"should get a new HD T.V"(ask Peter Schaeffer)as that will be only playoffs he'll see for many ayear if he takes the Leafs job.Overrated.

It's hard to fathom why the anti-offer sheet camp is coming down so hard on Lowe here; theoretically, the offer sheet ensures that young players have an opportunity to earn their fair shake too--as it should be. Brian Burke makes it seem like his little fraternity of GMs only agreed to this provision of the CBA in order to pay lip service to the principle of free enterprise, while maintaining a "gentleman's" (har) agreement between the league's GMs to subvert that very principle where young players are concerned, thus allowing GMs to hoard and underpay young talent. That to me is a disloyal practice, and more destructive to the league than a few oversized contracts. It's certainly self-destructive to organizations that count on this gentleman's agreement rather than offering a little loyalty and good faith to hold onto young talent, since underpaid people are generally unhappy people, and so more likely to bolt when they hit UFA status. Then teams end up losing a guy hitting his prime, and get no compensation. Brian Burke should be more concerned with why he couldn't get Penner signed before he was eligible to receive offers--why wouldn't a decent young player not want to play another couple years on a supposedly competitive Anaheim team? And as we saw, the Ducks had more issues last season than just Edmonton's poaching of Penner. The Niedermayer/Selanne debacle showed that Burke put a higher value on showing respect to a couple of past-their-prime veterans than doing what was best for the team. He let those two dangle the Ducks, and they got embarrassed in the first round. And it's hard to take Burke's complaints about skyrockething salaries when he's the one that overpaid for Schneider and Bertuzzi--which, by the way, was a product of teams having to meet the cap minimum. Hmm, maybe that's why salaries are getting bloated? But this was another provision that GMs like Burke agreed to. I do think Burke is justified to feel that Lowe is stupid for signing Penner, but only because the money Lowe spent on Penner probably could have been used to make Edmonton better in other places, since the reality is the Ducks still made the playoffs at least without Penner, while Edmonton failed to reach with him. But that's the risk involved. Burke gambles that Penner's not worth it; Lowe gambles Penner is worth more than the draft picks surrendered; Penner gambles that he can either live up to his contract, or that what he gets now will outweigh what he might have gotten later if he had stuck with a better Anaheim team. Of course, if Burke and Lowe would stop their bickering, maybe they could pay attention to what Ken Holland is doing over there in Detroit and learn a little.