Joe,
You're saying that we can sign free agents to deals whose first year salary is comparable to the
this year's salary of the players we lose. But according to the
article linked above, it depends on the
first year of the lost player's
new deal:
In many cases that could be significantly less - and presumably it would be even more limiting in that we'd need to actually wait for a player to be lost and signed elsewhere before signing another player, by which time the pool of available players may have dwindled further.
But i'd believe your version over the version described in the article if you confirm it!
...dave