Cash on Hand

Given that DC United has both dumped salary and made moves to add an allocation, there is a great deal of interest in adding a new player at some point. It's clear that there is some room to add a player, but how much? Let's see what we can find out. Looking at Goff's salary chart, let's add up the credits from the 2006 salary moves where DC doesn't seem to have made a one for one replacement yet.:

+163,500 Lucio Filomeno
+145,500 Santino Quaranta
========
+309,000 Free

That's not a small amount of money, but it's probably artifically large. There are several players that can probably expect to see raises in the off-season. For the sake of this thought-experiment, let's assign some raises to a few players.

Bobby Boswell: Yes, I think his contract last year was a multi-year one, but it might make sense to renegotiate yet again and lock him in for a few more years. Currently he's listed at $29K, but $45-50K doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Devon McTavish and Dominic Mediate: If you're going to keep them around, and why not given the good minutes both have provided, they'll probably move off of the developmental payscale. That's 18K a piece, so 36K overall.

Troy Perkins: You gave Nick Rimando a big raise last year, now it's Troy's turn. Now, Troy may only have a season of work in his resume to Rimando's two seasons, but you have to figure that the payscale will be similar. Let's add $50K there.

Misc.: Throw in another $50-75K for various contract raises and potential option years being exercised at increased prices and that's a total of around $190,000 in increased salary next season.

Bottom Line?

That $309,000 is now only around $120K-$140K. And that may not be the end. From various readings, it seems like Freddy Adu's count against the salary cap was an escalating factor, so in terms of cap space he may add on another $40,000 or so (a rough guess, that could be wrong.) So figure that, projecting forward, DC really only has between $80K-$120K to use on a new player, and they have an allocation. That means that despite losing two large contracts from the payroll, I fully expect only one new high contract to come in the door. At least, that's how I figure it on some napkin calculations. We're not in Christmas Shopping mode as a team, we're in selective buying mode.

Addendum: Of course, by the time I first stopped writing this post, I forgot the enitre point - What do we do? We clearly have some money on hand, and the way I figure it, you can either get one expensive (around $100,000) player or two decent role players (at around $50,000) to bolster DC. Personally, I think DC's midfield is in decent shape, and I'd prefer one reasonable sure acquisition to two "maybe they'll work" types. If it were up to me, I'd like DC to go after an outside defender, someone at RB or LB (preferable LB, since I think we have more acceptable options and depth at RB.) The usual fan choice is to get a "pure striker" but with Alecko Eskandarian healthy, that seems like less of a need than it was last year. Also, pure strikers are more of a roulette choice than most positions, so I'd prefer the stability in defense.