The Capitals’ loss of Cristobal Huet and their subsequent decision to replace him with Jose Theodore have immediately sparked intense debate amongst Caps fans, blogging community included. JP of Japers’ Rink contends that Theodore may just be the better goaltender, as does Pepper of the Red Skate. At the other end of the spectrum is Pucks’n’books from On Frozen Blog, who is echoing the sentiments of many disappointed Capitals fans (albeit in a much more reasoned and eloquent manner).

For any Capitals fan it’s impossible to be completely at ease with this personnel change: Theodore has been one of the most notoriously inconsistent goalies in the league over the last decade and it was easy to become attached to Huet for his play during the team’s incredible finish to the season. Despite this, George McPhee and the rest of the Capitals’ front office made the right decision when they elected to bring in Theodore, for two reasons.

The first is that Huet and his agent were apparently jerking the Capitals around during the negotiation sessions:

[McPhee] said the Caps started at the 3 years/$3.7 million and Huet’s camp started at 3 years/$5 million. McPhee said the Caps came up to $4.3 and then $4.6 and finally to $5 million per season, but Bartlett/Huet decided they wanted to test the market.

Other reports indicate that once Huet received his four-year, 22 million dollar contract offer from Chicago he and his agent came back and asked the Capitals to match, which the Capitals declined to do. Although the case could be made that Huet would have been worth the $5.6 million per year he’s getting from Chicago, there’s no reason to assume Huet and his agent were negotiating in good faith at the point they asked the Capitals to match. After all, Huet was given the contract he asked for, chose walk anyway, and then came back essentially asking the Capitals to engage in a bidding war with the Blackhawks. If the Capitals had matched Chicago’s offer why would it be more reasonable to assume Huet would have signed, rather than go back to Chicago’s management and asked for more? If this happens, the risk increases that Theodore signs elsewhere and leaves the Capitals no choice but to vastly overpay for Huet or sign a second-tier free agent like Ty Conklin, Alex Auld or Ray Emery.

The second is that the signing of Theodore to replace Huet may actually make the team better. The point of personnel decisions in professional sports isn’t to get the best player or the biggest name player and it’s definitely not to fall in love with, and overpay for, a player who played well for your team during a two month stretch. Rather, it’s to maximize a somewhat abstract characteristic that could be referred to as “ability to win games at an [NHL, MLB, NFL, etc] level”, “team competitiveness at a high level” or something of the like subject to any given constraints (in the case of the Capitals for 2008-09, that would be the 56.7 million dollar salary cap).

The dollar amount, and hence cap space, the Capitals have freed up by signing Theodore rather than Huet is not insignificant. For each of the next two years, Theodore’s cap hit will be 1.1 million dollars lower than Huet’s, an amount that personnel-wise translates into a valuable depth player like Matt Bradley ($1.1 million), Donald Brashear ($1.2 million), Boyd Gordon ($650,000 in 2007-08) or Milan Jurcina ($912,000) or the majority of a cap hit for a rookie (for example, Karl Alzner’s cap number in 2008-09 will be $1.675 million). Given the Capitals’ current cap-crunch, it could be the difference between retaining Shaone Morrisonn, Brooks Laich and Sergei Fedorov and having to let one of them walk. Three and four years out, when Huet will be 36 and 37 years old, the $5.6 million in salary cap space saved by the Capitals can be used to help finance extensions for Alexander Semin and Nicklas Backstrom. Assuming the Capitals manage their assets well (and recent history suggests they will), Theodore at $4.5 million for two years is better than Huet at $5.6 million over four year both in the short term and long term.

It may very well be the case that Huet is a better player than Theodore, but Theodore is the better signing.