travel_dude

Okay, so this year is even weirder than others, where so many players are looking for scraps and the likelyhood of anything longer than a year is doubtful. We have painted ourselves into corners so that the only thing we looked at was PTO's. Only a couple have worked out. Versteeg the most recent and he wasn't even invited. Ottawa is still in a world of hurt. Two players on IR, but no cap to sign Pinto and a few others. Not that's that a big deal, but they did sign a good player on a one year deal. I'm of the mind that if teams are offering anything reasonable for Backlund and it isn't taking back crap, we should do the deal. Not sure if Hanifin is drawing enough in return, but I might hold off on that one for now. Now, if we can get a replacement for him as a UFA and get a reasonable return, then it's less important to wait for the perfect deal. I am also of the mind that we should be looking at players on one year deals. Dumba has a high profile (and cost), Foote is young and cheap, and Bear is probably looking for a rebound. 2 of those guys might be able to replace some of the work done by Tanev or be trade assets.

Team captain last year. Returns to retire as a "Flame". No reason not to have the longest playing guy as your C. He knows how to play to stay in the pros.

So, you don't re-sign Hubey and Weegar. Both had poor seasons overall. You think that they would have high value? The vultures come looking more than the good deals. Anyway, I'm not happy with the off-season because we appear to be doing nothing. I get frustrated when it appears we are overthinking it. I don't know that to be the case, just the appearance.

I will be glad when the summer "blow it up" season is over for this team. Not that this thread bothers me, just there seems to be so much negativity about anything about this team. My problem with this team is that we are yet to see a good roster, good trades and signings, a good coach happen at the same time. Have a good roster, lousy coach. Have a good roster sign garbage and get into cap trouble. Have a great season for results, ruin that with poor coaching decisions and poor goaltending. There's only so much a GM can do. That includes stripping down the team to a point that can still be recovered. Were we to trade Huberdeau, Lindholm, Backlund, Weegar, Hanifin, Kadri, Mangiapane, Markstrom, Vladar we would never get back enough to rebuild in less than 6 years. And that would include signing crap to maintain the prospects we do have. So, we can continue with a thread that talks about something we are not doing and justify or criticize it, but it's kinda pointless. We aren't going there anytime soon. The crazy trade suggestions are more likely.

I look at top picks as a reason why you win a cup like I look at the illusion of causation. I won the race. I bet the guy that had old sneakers on. The sneakers were the reason why I won the race.

The cap arms race is a little daunting. There are teams that can take any crap they like. How do you compete?

Maybe it's just me but it seems like a lot of teams signed players to 1 year deals. So, these are all pending UFA's at the same time as Backlund and Lindholmk, etc. These are the players that will get sold at the TDL where teams are on the bubble or out. Keeping Backlund for TDL is too risky IMHO unless we have talks and plans to re-sign him. Sure he has value to us staying for the season. Sure, there are chances he is killing it and is a high value TDL piece. If that's the case, why are we trading him? He might not be the key to the cup, but maybe he wins us a series. I keep bouncing back and forth on this. The only thing that really bothers me about the GM is we don't know in July what direction we are going. It's not failure. I just would like to know where we are headed.

I don't consider Kadri close to a #1. So the re-tool is very difficult to do. I think we are seeing a bit of one right now, but it's kinda critical that we retain Lindholm. The way we have operated is to invest long term in players with value. That makes them non-trade fodder. We don't sign the one year deals with good players. Even Milano should or could have been a one year deal. We chose to not commit and leave it to Sutter to push him out. For the likes of Lewis, Lucic, Ritchie and such. This year is the year of one year deals, so TDL is going to be a ton of available players. It's why I won't wait for then to sell any players. Perhaps Connie was smart in not signing these deals, because they are most likely one and done.

We don't have GlenX's available. Last year it was Lewis, Ritchie and Lucic as pending UFA's. This year we have something like 8 remaining and we made one smart deal with the 9th. The problem is that we sign the types that don't have value to short deals and the ones that do have value get 3-4 years or more. And the coaches don't set up the players we could move for success. Bennett on back burner. Gio with a NTC. Monahan injured when we could have found value. Gaudreau signalling he was signing.

I guess the problem is you have no other top C on the team right now. Trading Lindholm doesn't get you one. Even a 1st coming back would not be a lotto first. Doubt a mid to late 1st gets you that player. Re-signing him carries the risk of the cap left to improve the team. Not bringing back Backlund is a sound decision. Trading Hanifin is not just "he wants to go" as much as we need to be strategic in next deals, We lose an offensive D-man and possibly get a good return + cap space this and next season. So, really you can only sign one of those 3 expiring players. Zadorov isn't going to cost as much as even Tanev makes. Tanev may not be a good investment unless he is willing to take a cut. Kylington is high risk high reward. Re-sign him before the season, but keep the term reasonable. He's not commanding $5M now, but a strong showing puts his cost way up. That leaves Dube that you can sign now or early on. Or trade if that gets you a better result.

Would you rather be STL or OTT? STL was more like us, but with more success with the recent cup win. The only reason they went on sell off mode was that they won the big prize after loading up for it. They are re-tooling more than rebuilding now. Tarasenko was strategic in that they couldn't afford to re-sign him and maintain making improvements.

The Sutter situation puts a lot of focus on the players. Media hounded them for bites. After Sutter was gone, they doubled back to see if the ones trashing him were now on board. Media in Sweden talking to Backlund. Speculation about Lindholm. Somehow Hanifin "says" he wants out, even though the speculation was that he's wanted to go to the USA for several years now. Is that really new news? We get the cash for clicks bunch here looking to say something like they are insiders. Maybe Connie is a bit too loose with the interviews, but I think there is more read into what he says than what he actually says. There are some good players out there waiting to sign. The market for them has dried up a bit. The trades that haven't happened yet are cursing them to have to wait. Most of the teams that have cap spaces have their rosters almost complete. So, the unsigned remain that way and the trades are being worked on quietly by the smart. Probably the ones you hear the most about are subterfuge. Bid up a player like Buffalo did with us and Eichel. Teams dangling players that they aren't trading to mess up value of other deals. Or just more noise from media hoars. Like CAR shopping TT, so they can sign Karlsson. What a joke. I think we will have a resolution to Hanifin and Backlund before the end of summer. That sets the stage for finishing with Lindholm one way or the other. The question becomes more of whether we go into the season without Dube and Tanev and Zadorov settled. They can happen anytime, but if you are shippng any out, then you need to sign a replacement in FA.

You get to work with what you have. We haven't had trades with picks and good prospects coming back to us. Schwindt and Govich are two of the only ones that came to us in trade that we didn't turn around and ship out. Young players that perhaps could have generated good return like Mange and Dube are being used to supplement the offence. Not that it's wrong, just that's where our best trade value is. Ras would generate a ton, but we probably lose our best or 2nd best D. Hanifin has to be traded. Probably isn't going to be picks and prospects, but perhaps it should.

Sorry, but trading a top C for an old C on an expensive contract + good prospect does not equate to Monahan trade. Maybe the better trade would be one year of Backlund for 4 years of Couture + Eklund.

I think that Conny does the re-signings this summer, after the rest of the issues are dealt with. With that, Dube should be re-signed before the season starts. He is arbitration eligible next summer. It's a risk to sign now, but more likely his arbitration submission will be higher than what you can get him for longer term now. With Rosie, I think he may finally get the right coach to motivate him. Nothing he did last year seemed to get rewarded. Top line production saw him get shuffled to bottom 6. 17 points in his first 20 games playing 10-17 minutes. Immediately dropped to 8-10 minutes. His last 5 minutes before the drop in minutes? 4 points in 5 games. I'm not saying Rosie is the most consistent, but when you get dropped while producing, it sends a strange message. Were there things about his game the coach noticed? Can't tell.

Can't also suggest that we missed out on Granlund or Fowler, since we failed to fail. We had Kipper, so I doubt that keeping the pick and not making the trade gets us top 10. Once he walked away, the problems with the team for far more obvious and we started picking top 10.

Give the 1st round pick history from 2004 onward: 2004 - Chucko 2005 - Pelech 2006 - Irving 2007 - Backlund (good pick but other rafted later also had great careers) 2008 - Nemeisz 2009 - Erixon 2011 - Baertschi 2012 - Janko Not exactly earth shattering. A missed 1st back then seems to have far less impact than one post 2012.

So, we missed out on Brandon Gormley? The biggest part of that trade was Lombardi. I hated the trade with NY to get rid of him though. That was pure Feaster madness.

I think we have to be a bit more brutal on what the core consists of. While Markstrom is currently the starter, I only think he's core for another year. And that's only because we have a rookie that has played 1 game and no other starter ready. Huberdeau and Weegar and maybe Ras are about as close to a core as we have. I give Hubey a bit of benefit of doubt because of the transition year and playing for a coach that misused him. He seems to be a guy you can win with. Lindholm is as close to a #1 as we have, but unless he turns Hibey back into a 100 point guy, I would say he is more complementary than core. I think we hold onto players too long, hoping for growth, but settling for middle of the road. We are not turning over the roster and wonder why nothing really changes. A career year by multiple players tends to get us a playoff round and not much else. Average seasons by most to all should get you that.

Eller's deal is a good base to look at. Backlund played a lot closer to top line minutes, so the points reflect that. I have trouble with the extension numbers, both term and dollars. 1 year starts at age 35. Two years gets him to age 37. Anything longer than that has to be front loaded and drop the AAV to less than 2M. I say that because it's very possible that a 4 year deal has one year bought out. 2 years at $4M seems steep, considering the potential decline by 2025/26. I view Backlund as the kind of player Eller is; a player you use to help get a winning club over the top, not the guy that helps you become a winning club. He would be a good player for PENS, since they lack defensive players or COL, who is right there needing maybe another role player. Dubas would probably give him 5x$4m.

My hope is that this year we start line matching when it's needed. PvP never was a good idea and I think teams that use it don't advance. EDM opted to use McD vs the world, but then again he played close to half the games they played. They could have also spread out their offense, but felt that teams couldn't defend him. Well, they couldn't defend him 100% of the time without taking penalties. When they got enough PP's they win. One of the big reasons why they beat us. Backlund was part of the PK, but couldn't stop 2 minutes of him at a time.

I dunno. He was used for a part season when he was 20/21. We had Langkow and Olli that year at C. His first full season he was 21/22. We had Olli, BMo and Stajan at C. He was beset in 2011/12 with injuries and missed half the season. 2013/14 was the Monahan year and he was effectively passed in the depth chart, especially with an injury. The following year his injury status impacted his games played but he had been passed by Monahan anyway. So, I don't really think he was ever a 100 point player that lost his prime due to not developing in the AHL. He may have gotten the shaft from his coach and forced to play 4th line for a stretch, but it's what he did with his time on the upper lines that points that way. Consider him in the mold of a Bergeron. Never really a top C for points. Consistent 50-60's points player. Is that bad? Nope. Would Backlund have 3 more good year left? Possibly. Do you want to pay him Bergeron money that he once deserved? Well he didn't bring the cup to Calgary.

He had an opinion on vax, which is his right. The conspiracy stuff makes him look too weird. Then again he may be 100% right.

Personally, I still don't see Tkachuk as a defensively smart player, but that is me. Backlund took that role to allow him to worry about forechecking and offense. Backlund is only now held back by Backlund. He makes good odd man rushes on his own but rarely uses his line. He shoots wide or mid target.

Check his twitter feed over the last few years. It's unfortunate that he uses his name to promote a certain political line. I'm not debating anything he said, rather that he chose social media to further his agenda. It's not a good look for him. As a Flames player, I thought he was one of the best. As a survivor, I respect his courage. As a influencer, I choose not to listen to him now.