travel_dude

I doubt there was any trade value for a pending UFA smallish AHL player with 2 games of NHL experience. I think the real problem is that you had a coach that prefers to play the boss card when given assets to use. Player X comes up from the farm on a tear. Player X sits in the press box because the existing goons are trusted, even though scoring had dried up and the goons were responsible for more scoring against than for. Both Pelts and Phillips were sat until the excitement of bringing them up had worn off. Hey look, I played Phillips 9 minutes in two games and all he did was hit the post and take a penalty. I was right, gosh darn it. The hype was wrong. Pelts played two games at 7 minutes and looked better on the 4th line. Think he played with Zohorna but frnakly I can't remember. He got bumped to 14+ minues until he got a point in game 7. Puting him on LW with Hubey on RW was a big mistake, but at least he was able to produce. Honestly, I have no idea if Phillips would ever succeed in the NHL, but there is no way to tell given his usage here. Playing him was a big middle finger to the fans and media suggesting he should get a look. Same way Pelletier's bump to the top line was. Not ready for that. Was Huberdeau somehow incapable of playing LW on a top line? I tend to agree that too many smaller players is not a good thing. Using Phillips to replace a small player is reasonable, but not to replace Lucic or Zohorna. You have to have the spot that allows them to be used effectively, if at all.

I'm hoping they don't overlook signing Beck with all the other things going on. We are finding gems in the later rounds, so I also hope that continues.

Haha. I was thinking that about any games I have watched in the playoffs. It's not even the first shots going in glove side high, which was a huge problem. Those 2nd chances would have been in. Here's what bothers me about Tkachuk's play and I don't know the reasons for it. He was deadly in round 1. Not so much in round 2. In round 3, he is the Gelinas. I get that he is a game breaker that finds the holes in coverage or goaltending. Why was he so useless against EDM with us? Was that a result of Sutter? I look at Bennett and see the same player trying to do it all himself. Same types of penalties. He is able to do something in FLA. Obviously better line mates. Given minutes to do something other than being gritty. FLA has a better roster this year than the Flames did last year, but not by leaps and bounds. The only thing I can suggest is that either the East was an easier route to the conference final or our goaltending and coaching was so bad we never had a chance.

The bolded is BS. I don't want Conroy, even if Iggy is likely to join the organization. He's very much an understudy of BT, so if we are looking to go a different direction, he is the wrong choice. I would welcome Dubas over him, and I really don't want Dubas. Conroy is too much of a players GM, so I don't think he has the business toughness to succeed. The coach couldn't do anything with the players he got, but the GM was getting the players that he wanted. Jarnkrok may have been the right player but the wrong coach. Didn't fit the way the lines were set. Or maybe the game style. I don't think the Leafs are a shining example of good GM and coach, since they are built backwards like the Oilers. They are built for offense. We are perhaps built better, but lack players that can play on a 2-1 team. We don't have the goalies to do it. We didn't have the 4th line to roll 4. A 2-1 team has to be built around superior goaltending and solid defense. All this to say that we got rid of one of the problems. Now we need the GM to bring in a progressive coach and make the serious roster decisions. We lost a year of prospect NHL development when we needed to find the next ones. We kept together a group that was failing to get the job done, with some of the pieces on expiring deals. We neither went for it nor sold it off. 16th is about as mediocre as you can get.

Couldn't find a thread about the 6th rounder. Decent year. Captain of the WHL Champ T-Birds. Signed last fall. Yep, another winger, but a big one at that.

This one I believe. They can still say he can't run the draft at a new place. Maybe this is a two way street. We get the A/GM from them, they get our old GM. Much better prospect than Bowman or Nonis or Bergevin. Blech.

I would prefer the Yotes stay, as I hope to see games there when I retire. If I am going to live in a landlocked province, I might as well spend the winters where it is warm.

I don't think anyone wants the team to just run it back. Getting a round at most is not a great idea for revenue. This year we had the Panthers type playoff team, albeit less talent and a poor coach. We had the makings of a team that could make some noise. That is done. And then I laughed. It was a roster on paper that could have made some noise. Goaltending not good enough. Poor coaching such that we would put out 4th line against McDavid. Mismatched players on lines.

Mr. Blackberry proved that Bettman was under the thumb of the TML. Well, okay it was both trying to grow the game, but TML were probably the biggest reason.

Yeah, I was a little worried that Love was a carbon copy of Sutter's systems. Muller was a big concern, so I hope regardless that he is replaced.

That's fair. I was picking on Sutter for the excess dump and chase at times and the shot volume comments.

I don't dispute the logic of a safe pick, but we have little in the way of high risk high reward players. I liked Raty.in the 2nd, but it's hard to tell yet if he will be better or worse than Stromgren. Wyatt Johnson was high risk because of the lack of games played. Coronato could still be better than him, but the early returns look good. One thing that has gone against us is the tendency to over-ripen prospects. It's not always the right thing to do. 2019 and 2020 pick and they would both start as Calder eligible rookies this season. We barely have any picks playing at the NHL level from 2017 onward. In fact we have but 2.

When has the safe pick worked for us? Coronato and Zary were safe. Both could have high ceilings but they appear to be middle 6 tops.

Wolf gets the 1-0 win tonight, so game 5 is Friday all tied up.

There is no good answer. If they do COL, the team will be mad. Pacific was the toughest division this year.

KC could probably use the existing one. But it's kinda close to STL. Yes, Houston makes sense, but you don't move all the top teams to one division. WPG is less of a contender and would fit in with the Alberta teams. Too many CDN teams in one division?

It's not just punctuation, it also depends on what you are responding to. If I was talking to someone that suggested a minor retool or a rebuild, I would start with minor. If you are contrasting costs, you start with the lowest if you are upselling, to show the little differences. Good, better, best. Music is funny. When they talked to John Lennon about the impressive use of certain types of notes, chords, hooks and such, he said it sounded good. English language is funny to. Some things sound right but are not correct. Write down or record a speech and someday someone may say it was brilliant for the use tempo or combining metaphors and letters. The writer may just have had a hangover.

To me, not in a rebuild state is that we haven't got to the point that most teams were at when they did one. If you look at our last one (perhaps really the only one), we were trading Iggy and losing Kipper. We had players trending down very rapidly and the state of of defense was shoddy. We are nowhere near that. Yes, we should have traded Iggy much sooner, much like trading Gio before we lost him for nothing. To me, retool is the proper narrative we should be using. And I agree with that. Major or minor is really the difference in opinions. As I have said, trading Backlund and Tanev and Hanifin is a good thing to consider. Two of them are due raises or long term deals or captaincy or short term similar rate deals. None are poised to be better. Backlund had a career year and we sucked anyway. I disagree about roster construction vs coaching strategy. It was a poor construction for a Sutter team. It may be poor for a FLA type team but we never played that style. We have to turn over the 4th line players we had (two at least). Dube and Mange are similar players, and both were not used properly. Toffoli is ideally a 2nd line player, not the first wave. A shutdown line with a former 30 goal scorer is stupid. Inconsistent 2nd line RW and playing Kadri with Hubie was dumb. So, out of this mess of lines and players, how do you determine who fits? The only way I can see is to keep one of duplicate players and trade the other. Use more than a poor pro scout to find the right players coming in. Heck, at this point I would trade Hanifin for Willie Nylander and Backlund for Vince Dunne. You are going to need floaters that can score.

Can't use the R word hehe. Really, we are not in a rebuild state. Our oldest players are the goalie, Backlund and Tanev. We are 2 years out before the vets get to that age. Even so, the vets can still be productive at that age. I really think that you need to trade the mentioned vets as part of a get younger campaign. Hanifin or Dube or Mange might have to go for the high value in getting a good player back.

KC or Houston. Likely KC though since Bettman wants to grow the game. Maybe Coachella Valley would be good choice. I can't see COL being the one to swap if it's Houston though. Top teams won't swap conferences.

So, I have to ask. Is Love the type of coach that would get more offense out of our NHL team or is he more of a Sutter type that relies on shot volume and play like it's a less skilled team? I don't watch the AHL games, so I can't tell you if it's like watching the Flames or just not having enough high end skill. The reason why I am asking is that there is a chance that he could become our new head coach, should the new GM go that route.

I think the only thing stopping Lindholm from signing today is the unknown about what the GM is going to build. You tell him that you are going to bring in scoring and have a coach build lines based on skill not bump and grind, he will be fine with it. Obviously, he was ticked that Sutter couldn't bear to have a line with the top 3 players on at the same time. And he's wondering if a coach is going to turn a decent middle 6 player like Jarnkrok into another Rieder with bad water.

I don't know he said young. Definitely looking for offense. Done with the 2-1 games and one goal leads/losses. Personally, I would prefer that we bring in a good GM who has good sense of the type of coach (and knows about them) and bring in Love as an A/coach. I know that may not be something Love would accept, but it would be the best way to integrate farm players. You can love or hate the last GM, but he was told to build a contender. That means you pay top dollar for UFA's and make trades that don't dip into your current roster. The Neal signing was probably the worst mistake signing that I can think of, but it was based on recommendations of who to target. Trading him for Lucic was saving the owners a bunch of cash and we didn't pay him to stay home. The unfortunate thing is that it's going to be difficult for any new GM to be able to evaluate the players without having seen them play. He would have to lean on the people that wanted specific players in the first place. Or wait until part of the season is played. Or review game tapes and talk to players about other players. That would be based on how they played under Sutter or with players no longer here.

The 5 game format sucks. They really dominated on the shot clock in the fist OT. Something like 19-3. Even had a PP. Daccord stopped 62 in total to Wolf's 51. Crazy.

I was trying to figure out how EDM ended up with the sad D-corp they played in the playoffs. Did a bunch of them catch something from drinking water and get pushed out of the lineup? Deharnais and Broburg? That's after Kulak and Ceci are considered top 4? Want a lousy goalie, just wait for TOR to not extend one. Or trade a bad one for a worse one. Anyway, a new GM and new coach will do wonders if we don't go dumpster diving. I like Brunette, but I think we wold need to remake the roster. Maybe not a bad idea, it was hard to get by having the 4th line we suffered through this year. It would be nice if a PTO was less born after we won the cup.