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Josepho

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Everything posted by Josepho

  1. It's going to be over 3 per for 3 years. For a player who's declining, this will look awful in year 3. Unbelievable that anyone ever defended this moron and thought he was magically going to stop &^@#ing up our cap situation.
  2. I was told Benning wasn't going to overpay bottom 6 players in term anymore.
  3. Fine, if you don't like my specific example in Toronto, I can give ones from other teams where the "hometown discount" isn't a factor. Guys like Conor Sheary in Washington, Corey Perry in Montreal or Carl Soderberg in Chicago are also providing lots at a cheap price. Motte is a very average 4th liner and the fact that he's seen as some huge win for Benning is more so a reflection on how godawful his pro-scouting acquisitions have been. Basically every other "project" Benning has taken on (Pouliot/Pedan/Vey/Clendening/Granlund/Etem/Larsen) has failed, reflecting on the idea that Benning is garbage at evaluating hockey players. Bonino didn't just "go on to do better things" elsewhere, he literally was coming off productive seasons both in Vancouver and Anaheim. I don't see how you can argue that 1.9mil for a 2nd line C on a playoff team with 39 points in 75 games isn't really good value. And notice how Pittsburgh used Bonino making that kind of money to support other parts of the lineup better. How can you watch a hockey game and tell me a difference of about 2 faceoffs per game moves the needle that significantly, considering how often the puck changes possession. Once again, tell me why Beagle's possession metrics are such garbage if the amount of faceoffs he's winning makes a significant difference. Sure, Beagle penalty kills, but he's not particularly good at it. Amongst regular PKers on this team he has the 2nd worst PKGA/60 on the entire roster. He's not actually doing a good job at killing penalties, and there are certainly going to be other, cheaper players that can kill penalties as well. I'm not expecting Beagle to do score much or anything, I know what he is. I just think he was given a bad contract by a dumb GM, it's not Beagle's fault he's being paid well-above what he's worth. Again, I'm not necessarily a proponent of throwing any cheap player on the ice -- the player actually has to be good. As I've given with my Thornton/Spezza/Perry/Soderberg/Sheary/Verhaeghe examples, it's definitely possible to find these types of players at lower salaries. And if our GM isn't capable of finding these types of deals, maybe he's not the right one for this team considering where it needs to go. I never said a cheaper player would automatically be better than someone like Beagle, I said/implied that getting a cheap (and hopefully good) 4th line C making 1 million + using that other 2 million elsewhere is better than having someone like Beagle, and that this is how basically every good team in the league structures their 4th line's salaries. The problem with the "cheap player model" is that our cheap players were bad because Benning isn't good at evaluating pro-level talent, and that the money saved by going cheap wasn't properly used to help the team elsewhere. I've given plenty of examples of actual cheap, good, short-term experienced players on other teams in the league. If anyone is underestimating the importance of or misusing statistics, it's you. Go ask any analytics-guy how they feel about faceoffs as a statistic. Tell me how you feel about the fact that by all shot metrics, Beagle isn't anything other than a mediocre to subpar 4th liner. People (at the very least smart people) would not pounce on Benning for signing 4th liners cheaply, because it also means that he's spending more money at the top of the lineup. That is the entire point of going cheaper for 4th liners. It's not because cheap players are inherently better than or comparable to Beagle, even though lots of them probably are.
  4. If their plan was to rebuild by overpaying 4th liners in free agency (talking specifically about term here, not necessarily the AAV), then it was a stupid plan without foresight., especially since we already had leaders, and other leaders were available cheaper and with shorter term. We ended up losing a lot of our momentum from 19/20 because of the "leaders". We should've been adding to our lineup, not taking away. Nothing good gets accomplished by twiddling your thumbs waiting for bad contracts to end. All you're doing is pissing off your core by doing that. Do you think Miller/Pettersson/Horvat/Boeser/etc are happy seeing guys like Toffoli walk and the team not improving for a few years?
  5. I was specifically referring to 4th liners in my post. I don't mind bringing in really good 3rd liners at ~4mil/year, as long as we've managed the rest of our cap fine and aren't losing any of our actual best players.
  6. The main problem with Eriksson's contract is that it was too long, the player was 31 (3 years older than Toffoli at the time of their UFA), had injury issues, already was showing decline (only had a productive year on Bergeron/Marchand's line after having two underwhelming prior seasons), and the main issue was that this team was awful. If a contending team at the time signed him to a ~4 year deal, it wouldn't have worked out but it at least would've been an understandable decision. Why are cheap players inherently bad or unproven to you? Look at how much production Toronto is getting out of guys like Thornton and Spezza for instance, see what Florida is doing with guys like Verhaege. A good GM should be able to identify bargains like that. I'm not just saying to throw any rookie out there. Will not deny that Granlund was an awful player, but I have no idea how you can watch Bonino be a great roleplayer on some very good Pittsburgh/Nashville teams, and conclude that he was the issue. Trading Bonino (who wasn't even bad here) away for a more expensive Sutter was an extremely obvious blunder by Benning and I have no idea how one can argue otherwise. The Canucks getting rid of him before his subsequent successes in Pittsburgh and Nashville indicates that the Canucks &^@#ed up, not that Bonino was a poor player or the issue with this team. No one will accuse Aquilini of being a cheap owner, because under these circumstances the Canucks would be spending that money on actual good players higher in the lineup. Ottawa's problem isn't their cheap 4th liners. Ottawa's issue is that they only have one good defenceman while bums like Gudbranson/Zaitsev make a combined 8mil, and that Matt Murray has been complete garbage for a 6mil goaltender. You're using another appeal-to-authority argument here. Winning a lot of faceoffs might be important if you could actually win a lot, say 80% of them. But nobody actually wins that many. In 2017-2018, Beagle won 58.2% of his faceoffs per game and averaged 12.6 per game. If Beagle takes 13 faceoffs in a game, the difference between 58.2% and 40% (a range in which basically all NHL centers fall into) is 2 faceoffs per game, which is extremely inconsequential considering the amount of possession changes in a hockey game. And Beagle having awful possession stats should indicate that there clearly isn't that much of a correlation between faceoffs in possession. Sure, there is the occasional time where a goal against is a direct result of a faceoff. But, given how little variance there is in actual faceoff success leaguewide, we probably score off of faceoffs about as much as we get scored on. The Willie teams didn't suck because of guys like Michael Chaput, they sucked because they had guys like Gudbranson/Sutter/Eriksson/Sbisa playing higher in the lineup than they should've. Our cheap players weren't good because Benning is incapable of regularly finding actual good cheap players, it's not because they were cheap. Plenty of teams around the league have found good enough fourth liners making virtually no money.
  7. Tampa had really productive players like Gourde/Killorn/Cirelli playing lower in the lineup just based on how deep the team was. We're talking about a team that had a player as good as JT Miller stashed on the third line. Guys like Sutter/Beagle/Roussel were never even close to as good as those players. And the reason Tampa could afford to have slightly pricier guys on the third line is because their 4th liners and bottom pair was extremely cheap. Same thing with St. Louis. Guys like Maroon and random guys on ELCs like Barbashev led to way more cap flexibility in the lineup. If they paid more for their 4th line, they probably wouldn't even have been able to acquire O'Reilly in the first place.
  8. Reasonable is under 5 mil per year for 4 years for someone who has been a productive player his entire career. If Toffoli signed a 6x6 or whatever, I would have been okay with Benning letting Toffoli walk if that was the kind of deal he was getting. Winning a Stanley Cup doesn't automatically mean that player should be overpaid. And, even if it did, there are other ways to get cup champions. We got one in Pearson, and all we had to do was trade one of our worst defencemen for it. In that same offseason, guys like Kunitz and Filppula signed cheap deals. Somewhat ironically, bringing in "cup pedigree" from Beagle and Holtby led to losing "cup pedigree" from Toffoli. It's not that his contract on its own is necessarily the worst thing in the world, but when you combine it with all the other bottom 6 players that we've overpaid, then it adds up. For example, if Beagle and Roussel are replaced by 1mil players, we then have 4mil to play with -- that's very important in a cap-based NHL. Look at how teams like Vegas, Boston and Tampa are never overpaying for 4th liners or 3rd pairing defencemen, so they can keep money to retain actual good players. Hell, shouldn't it say something that Washington had no problem letting Beagle sign elsewhere after winning their cup? He might play minutes and try hard, but there's no statistical evidence indicating that he's anything other than an average 4th liner. Faceoffs rarely correlate with actual possession time. If we want "leadership", there's no reason we can't bring in leadership from actual important players. We've had good leaders like Hamhuis and Richardson that we've treated like $&!# and let leave in place of inferior players -- why couldn't they be our leaders?
  9. There's a difference between signing an actual good player in Toffoli to a very reasonable deal while you're trying to contend and signing guys like Beagle and Roussel to massively overpaid 4 year deals. The whole reason people were upset over the Beagle/Roussel signings is that they were worried that something like this would happen as a direct result of those signings.
  10. At the time of the signings, the Islanders had just lost Tavares after missing the playoffs -- that definitely wasn't a team expected to be good in 18-19 and he would've come here if we outbid them on AAV or maybe even added an extra year to the deal. Then we wouldn't have been as cap-strapped for years that we should be competing in. If Benning desperately wanted his "cup champ mentor" in the 2018 offseason, then signing Filppula or Kunitz is what he should've done. There's a ton of those guys you can acquire cheaply or more efficiently than Beagle.
  11. Interesting that the Islanders managed to sign a cup champion veteran center in Filppula in that offseason for one year while we had to give Beagle four.
  12. The fact that the 2018 Canucks defence looked like that is Benning's fault. You shouldn't put yourself in a position where you absolutely have to overpay (the term is the bigger problem than the AAV here) free agents. This Myers contract was just a selfish desperate attempt from Benning to save his job because he was too terrible at it to find any other defenceman. Hell, we would've been better off keeping Biega and throwing that 5mil difference elsewhere. If you've managed your assets properly (i.e. not trading away McCann/2nd for Gudbranson, not constantly giving up picks for Vey/Pouliot types, maybe accumulating assets through trading for other team's bad assets like Carolina), you can afford to make a move for a defenceman through trade, or you could've prepared for this in advance. Nick Jensen was available at a reasonable price at the deadline, and signed a very cheap extension -- he's been crushing it in very hard minutes for Washington. That would've been miles better. Winnipeg let Myers walk despite losing two other RD that offseason and being a very unpopular place to play. Cheveldayoff stayed patient and later acquired, then cheaply extended Demelo. Even dating back to the expansion draft, teams like Washington/Anaheim likely would've sold Schmidt/Theodore to us, but we were focused on protecting losers like Gudbranson and Granlund.
  13. I think you need to do more than spend to be a good owner. If you're running a sports franchise, you need to be good at managing your employees. You need to believe in your guys enough to defer to them, and fire them if you don't believe in them. If you keep an employee who has mismanaged your assets this badly, you're a bad owner. The fact that he hasn't fired Benning doesn't mean that Benning is a good/acceptable GM. There's circular logic here where you believe Aquilini can do no wrong and consequently his GM can do no wrong. He's not the sole problem, sure. He can both have his problems as owner, and Jim can be a poor GM. Replacing Benning with someone more progressive who understands the concept of the salary cap will unquestionably improve this team.
  14. That suggests that Aquilini is a bad owner, which I think most people would agree with.
  15. Just off the top of my head. Anyone who can identify obscure scouting hires clearly has some insight in terms of what the organization is doing. Glad you can't back up your claims.
  16. Give me specific examples of what you're talking about. Friedman also reported this if you don't believe Dhaliwal.
  17. Some of the media has been spot-on in terms of what has been happening with this team. A guy like Rick Dhaliwal has gotten so many things right over the years, he's not going to destroy his credibility by pulling things out of his ass.
  18. Ekman-Larsson is on an absolutely horrendous contract and has declined significantly. Trading any assets for him would've been inexcusable, salary retained or not. The absolute last thing we needed was to take on another long contract for a declining player. I wouldn't even pick him off waivers and we caught a huge break by having to "settle" for a better player/contract in Schmidt. And yes, the fact that he was obsessively chasing OEL while neglecting every other task is easily the biggest problem there. This is part of why people think he sucks at planning, he's seemingly incapable of multitasking.
  19. A topic being beaten to death doesn't mean it wasn't still a massive and avoidable mistake. I can similarly say that Benning supporters mentioning the Pettersson pick is "beaten to death", but that's not fair.
  20. He mostly is deferring to others in this video, so yeah. I don't see an issue with it. As a GM, there's nothing wrong with deferring to competent people.
  21. more stellar planning from ol jimbo on display. can't wait until he walks and more excuses get made.
  22. Nobody thinks "the sky is falling". The poster thinks that that specific move lacked planning, and that lack of planning might occur later. You literally haven't done a thing to refute their point. Hoglander is obviously promising but we'd be better (maybe even in the playoffs) if we had both players. Benning didn't even intend to replace him with Hoglander, the "we ran out of time" comment basically admits he failed to sign Toffoli and didn't plan the situation properly. You're coming across as extremely condescending when you use this "Xbox" analogy all the time to combat anyone's issue with this management team. It's extremely reasonable to expect a GM to not "run out of time" when attempting to sign a player and I've never heard a similar comment from any other GM before.
  23. My entire point is that Brackett wasn't just leaving for a change of scenery or whatever, there was a specific reason relating to our front office. I stated already that Brackett leaving may or may not matter. If our drafting becomes worse after he leaves, would you not agree that Benning should've backed off and let Judd do his thing? I will gladly admit that I was wrong if our drafting is good after Judd leaves. Maybe if Benning spent less time amateur scouting and more time pro scouting, he'd actually do a better job at building a supporting cast for our core.
  24. he hears things and starts to wonder things that are later mentioned by judd himself: https://twitter.com/FriedgeHNIC/status/1266475493915754501/ maybe these reporters actually know what they're talking about and aren't pulling ideas out of their ass.
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