After reading the article and some comments I wonder if the Fins were actually aware that they could have lowered their cap hit this season. The capologist, Dawn Aponte, was fired from Cleveland because she created cap problems..she does a bad job,,to put it kindly.
On top of that you add all the dead cap space (approx 10 million) from bad deals with players no longer with the team and it is easy to see why we have less cap space. The Fins organization is very sloppy, disorganized, and wasteful.
That extra money that is dead cap, or unrealized cap space could have enabled us to land Manning or 2 other top FA's if we chose to go that route. The old expression.."follow the money" leads right to this inefficient front office.