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DownUndaCanuck

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Everything posted by DownUndaCanuck

  1. Dominant display but it was against the worst team so can't put too much stock into it. Rick rolled all 4 lines, interesting to see how ice time was spent. OEL ends up with more minutes than Hughes, watch this space. Myers looked active out there, obviously our stars all looked good and so did Miller against easy center opposition. Only blemish is 0/5 on the PP, no idea why King's still here but surely that turns around. We have to win 27 of the last games to get into the playoffs. This move should have happened when we were a .500 team or in the offseason, not now. Still, next game against Seattle will be interesting, then the tough road trip after the ASG. Good luck to Rick.
  2. Still think we're one Miller too heavy there. Imagine that 8M poured into a star defenceman, and then just plonk Hoglander or Podkolzin there. Much better team. I think for balance-sake I'd ideally trade Miller and his 8M, trade Boeser and his 6.5M and heck even get rid of Garland's 5M. Ideally we move Myers if he still sucks with Tocchet and his 6M. Then with the 25M, spend 8M on keeping Bo, 6M on Kuzmenko, spend 5-6M on a decent top-4 defenceman, 3M on a 3rd line center and 3M on Bear to play as our 4th defenceman. Of course easier said than done but that would be better balance than what we have now - with Miller at wing we have a ludicrous amount of cap spent on wingers.
  3. Lots of talk of Larkin negotiations not going well, wonder if there's a swap to be had there. Bo + Schenn for Larkin + 1st?
  4. Too early to get Tocchet's philosophy in, I think we'll still be leaky defensively. Could go on a 10 game winning streak and we still won't be in a playoff spot, mad. 3-2 Canucks
  5. Sounds like BB might join TV, would be ironic considering Rick's just come from TNT. Many teams will be watching the Canucks, if we still suck without Bruce you have to think he gets a job offer with an inferior team. If we sky rocket with Tocchet, I think BB's coaching days are done. His offensive style fits this league very well though.
  6. I worry about this, plus Demko's return, they'll probably end up playing like a 0.55 - 0.6 points percentage team which will really hurt our chances. I bet we get a little bump up from Rick, plus our schedule's nicer now. Any bets we end up above a bunch of these bad Eastern teams, but not good enough to get into the Nashville/St. Louis range of mediocrity. I think we'll be 8th last by the end of it, really drops our chances of Bedard. We're so close to Arizona or San Jose passing us if they get a bit better but I doubt it'll happen.
  7. Sounds like the asking price for Bo is a young player, prospect and pick. Chychrun's asking price was once 4 players, now down to 3 I believe. I think Hughes would be worth a top player, top prospect and 1st at the very least, then probably some garbage (3rd pick or something). No player is worth dismantling your team like that though. I'd like to think someone like say Hedman or Makar in their prime is worth the equivalent of, I dunno, 4 firsts? Probably the same for McDavid. Even then, if you had say 4 mid-round firsts, say 1 of them is a bust, 1 is an average top-6 forward, 1 is a top-4 defenceman and 1 is a star, you've got more value to a team than McDavid. These monster trades just don't make sense for the receiving team. For Hughes to NJD for example, that'd be something like Nemec + Holtz + 1st. No way they give up more. Nemec is likely going to be a star, maybe better than Hughes. Holz is already a decent player and that 1st could be 30% a bust, 40% a top-6/top-4 player, and maybe 30% a star.
  8. They don't have the cap space, they have their goalie's extension kicking in next year, not much cap off the books in the off-season and will have to re-sign some D-men. Don't see it happening. For interest sake, who does a captain swap. Bo for Ekblad? I'd jump at it. Who's more important to a team - obviously a top all-around RD, but he's having a pretty bad year and Bo is having a pretty great year. Maybe we add, give them Schenn or Bear as well? Would be a real block-bluster but would fix both teams needs.
  9. Dangerous game to play. Having Bo match up against Petey would be a nightmare. I think Petey wins the matchup but imagine Bo in the bumper slot against our dead-worst PK, he'd rip us apart.
  10. I think a big reason management won't let him talk contract terms with other teams is that a lot of the potential teams have loads of cap coming off the books next year and could offer him stupid money. I wonder if any team would even say 9M, then there's no way he re-signs here. I think probably in 2-4 weeks prior to the deadline once we've 100% ruled out a re-sign, Allvin will let other teams talk contract terms and things will speed up, but they must still be trying to re-sign him and somehow Kuzmenko for 6M too. Bo at 8.25M would be alright consider Petey is going to hit 9-10M+. Having Petey at 10M, Bo at 8.5M and Miller at 8M is nice, but then we can't have 4 wingers at 5-7M, along with 3 expensive defencemen. Something's got to give. For me, get rid of the wingers, build around you centermen. Give Bo 8.5M if he wants. Give Petey 10-11M (he'll be a monster in his contract year, just watch). I'm not saying go as top-heavy as Toronto, but build around centers, not expensive wingers. Brock at 6.6M, Garland at 5M, Mikheyev at 5M and now Kuzmenko at 6M is all too rich for my blood. We can't have it all. Get rid of two of those guys and just rotate cheap guys and ELCs in on wing around Bo, Miller and Petey and they'll succeed. For me, Brock and Garland can go for picks and we use the money to keep Bo and Kuz but we simply can't and shouldn't have it all. I'd ignore the D for now - we should be spending around 7M on a top defenceman (Hughes), then 6-7M on a couple of top-4 guys. The problem is that they're just not playing like top-4 guys but the spending % of the cap is pretty bang on unless you're lucky like Carolina and just have D-men playing out of their socks.
  11. Tocchet said it sounds like he'll try and work some other players in who aren't in the lineup, I think he's talking about Hoglander and Podkolzin and maybe even Rathbone there. Would be nice to build around them and put them in positions to succeed.
  12. More and more reports coming out of Babcock nearly signing, yikes. I don't think all of this will come down on Tocchet, I think he'll really manage by group - Foote and Gonchar will be interesting but sounds like he's using the Sedins a lot. Imagine having a team with the Sedins, prime Foote and Gonchar... It's all well and good to say this, but this is a very different era and hockey game to when all these guys were playing. It's much faster, far more mistakes and there's much more offence. My only worry is they'll coach the way they played which was a long time ago. When you look at some of the sucessfull teams around the league, they've all got relatively young coaches. The BBs, Babcocks and Quinnevilles are gone. This 3 game swing is going to be bananas and can't read much into it, but after a good 9 day break it'll be interesting to see what the coaches come up with. I'm indifferent to the hire, I know BB had to go but honestly this should have been done when we were a .500 team and still had a chance to make the playoffs. Now, we might as well have waited for the off-season and let Bruce have fun out there. Stupid timing, couldn't be worse by management. They waited too long to make a decisive trade (never did), now they've waited too long to make a coaching change. With Green and BB last year they waited too long as well.
  13. I like what Rick said about not having 7-8 minute guys and getting everyone involved, we've seen coaches like AV and BB just bury bottom-6 players. Everyone needs to contribute. Interesting to see Studnicka on the top line for example but I see why he's doing it. This team needs a LOT of things to be better, but my main thought would be a solid 3rd line center and one or two top-4 defencemen. We've got Miller in the 3C spot now but he's struggled at that role before, let's see if he's any better under Tocchet. In terms of our defence, we have Hughes who is a legit top-4 guy. We have Bear playing out of his socks - was a 7th defenceman with Carolina so realistically isn't a true top-4 around the league on other playoff teams (but just is with us). Then there's the big elephants - OEL and Myers. Hard to say how good or bad they'd be on other teams to be honest. I think they still have potential in there, there's just too much experience for them to suddenly be so bad. We see guys like Burns and Karlsson re-invent their careers after moving from a bad team to good teams, and I bet the same would be true for OEL and Myers. On our team under Bruce they sucked though so let's hope Tocchet's structure brings their play back and supports them, but they need support from their forwards and goalie to be successful and they weren't getting either under BB. Regardless, we need one top-4 defenceman. With so many wingers, we can afford to flip at least one. It all hinges on how Miller plays at center - if he plays well, we should aim to keep Bo, lock down 3 of the best centers in the league and build around them with cheap wingers and kids, and then flip some of our more expensive wingers (Brock, Garland, Kuzmenko even) for a top-4 defenceman. If OEL and Myers still struggle under Tocchet then we're in serious trouble. We have to move one of them - Myers seems to have interest. OEL is likely going down with the ship, I doubt management have the balls to pull off that buy-out. Then we use Bo and a winger to resupply our defence.
  14. Simple question - with a complete change in structural philosophy, who will do well and who won't under Tocchet? I think Myers will have a resurgence of his game and become solid defensively again as will OEL. Can't really get much worse but I think there's still some peak Myers in there and Rick will unlock it (already looks like he's paired with Hughes). I think Miller will struggle to score to be honest and drop his points a fair bit as will Horvat. I think Petey will drop a bit of offence but not really noticeably as will Hughes, their superstar skills will pull them through.
  15. Lisening to the presser I do have some confidence in Rick, he's saying all the right things, had always been a personable guy in the locker room, worked in media so might be able to handle the Vancouver pressure and preaches good defence first which I hope will fix Miller, Myers and OEL's leaky game. However that's all in theory. I'll take 1 or 2 goals off our offence a night if it means our PK improves to middle of the league and we stop more than 3.5GAA nightly. JR's comments were rubbish but you can see that he's trying to build a winning culture. Timing wise this makes no sense, what are they possibly playing for now? You know we're out of reach by now, this move should have been made around Christmas to still give it a shot. Now we're just playing for stats.
  16. If we can somehow land a mid round 1st by trading one of our manu forwards, we can really jumpstart this retool/rebuild by drafting a top center and defenceman. Bedard, Fantilli or Carlsson would be nice but I doubt we move up to top 3 so realistically we'll be picking one of Smith, Dvorsky or Yager. Then with the later pick we take a top defenceman like Gulyayev, Sandin Pellikka or Reinbacher. None of them are generational, maybe not even elite but solid top-6 centers/top-4 defencemen to build the future around in one swoop.
  17. I think he goes 3rd overall but would be great if we move up and nab him, I take him over Fantilli any day (think Petey vs Middlestat/Glass vibes), Carlsson and Petey as a 1-2 punch would be so good and his size really complements Petey's skill. Basically a big strong Bo replacement.
  18. Might go down as one of the best Canucks coaches of all time and he was only here a year and never really won anything. Insane. AV took us to a cup final, Crawford pulled us through a fair bit but neither got as much love as Bruce has. Tells you how much the fans appreciate a cheery, funny guy. I was always an AV fan but it's a different love for Bruce, especially after this victimisation. He won't be long out of a job if that's what he wants, hope he takes the rest of the season off and after the coach carousel at the end of the year he ends up on a playoff team again.
  19. This is certainly up there. The last 5 years have been brutal but honestly it's been a decade now. Obviously losing the cup final in 2011 is as acutely sad as it gets but this is just deeply chronically depressing. We haven't made the moves necessary yet to thrust this team into a playoff spot and until we make some major trades, acquire good young players and picks, develop them the right way and start to win, we won't compete with the real playoff teams of this league any time soon. I hope they don't just look for 6-12 month fixes here anymore. I get it, ownership and management don't want to do a full rebuild, but they can't just go trading Bo and Boeser away for other 25-30 year old players in their prime and rinse and repeat the same problems. We've got to level this club to some degree and start again with Petey and Hughes as our older guys going forward. After 2011 you expected a fall-off. The subsequent year we were still strong but then slowly but surely our core declined and got older, Bieksa and Kesler left, then it was sad watching the Sedins lose so many games and once they left we were officially toast. Many good teams rebuild once their core have peaked and decline but we did the very weird thing of trying to hang on and stay competitive and it really didn't work out well, we were a fringe playoff team for a while, then just a non-playoff team. The Covid bubble was fun but a blip thanks to Demko and sadly we still had too many players in their prime and no young guys in our organisation. We could easily continue this trend of mediocrity by trading Bo for other guys in their prime and keeping everyone else and just waiting out these cap hits though so it's far from over yet...
  20. Nobody's talking about this guy enough, just quietly he's 4th or something in scoring in the AHL, leads the league in assists I believe and is over a PPG as a defenceman, just racking up offence every time he's on the ice. Not scoring much but looks like he's running the show over there. I know the Canucks have Hughes and OEL locking down the top-4 left side but come on, when you've got a guy having as great a season as he is, he deserves some NHL time. I remember him in training camp really impressing me over a lot of NHL regulars. Hughes - Bear Wolanin - Myers OEL - Schenn Why not? What do you have to do to get a call-up these days? It's not like we're on a 10 game heater.
  21. Lots of chatter about Lysell + for Bo makes me quite nervous. Boston don't have any other decent prospects, don't have a 2nd, their 1st is basically a late pick/2nd rounder and they aren't going to give us good roster players to break up their chemistry. Lysell is PPG in the AHL right now, Swedish and played junior with Vancouver so I worry Allvin will get sucked into all these ties and go for him but my goodness if we trade the best asset we've had in years for yet another winger and ignore defence yet again, the writing's on the wall for management. Lysell and two firsts from Boston still doesn't cut it, that's basically a decent winger prospect and two 2nd round picks (probably around 30-32nd overall drafts). Got to be much better out there and we need defence and young centers. I was all for Bo + Schenn for Zacha + Carlo but I doubt they'll part with these guys now, even if they are tertiary players. Sounds like the asking price for Bo is 3 players, probably a young C, young D and pick depending on all the value. Boston just don't have that package whereas plenty of other teams do.
  22. Would do that, and I think they would too. They've got Berniers blowing everyone away, Horvat steps in at 1C for now but soon Berniers takes the top line roll and then they have a bunch of good 3Cs (Gourde, Schwartz, Geekie etc.), they really don't have room for Wright unless someone plays on the wing but Bo could be their 2C for a good 5 years. Wright probably plays as our 3C next year and Borgen goes straight in on our bottom pairing for now but hopefully plays a bit with Hughes...
  23. When I heard we hired Bruce the first thing I thought was great, he's a nice cheery guy, loved across the league and a proven winner. First thing I think of with Tocchet is a criminal who ran a gambling ring, bounced around media and a serial loser behind the bench. Couldn't be more different. Looking at Foote and Gonchar's coaching records, they're not great. Gonch helped out in Pittsburgh and Foote only really coached in the WHL and was fired after a bit. What we need is players like those two on the ice right now, not behind the bench, but I hope some of their experience pays off defensively. Clearly JR wants to get guys in who have won Cups. I don't know why everyone obsesses over this, it doesn't always correlate to winning more cups (especially from a player to coach). I think JB got a bit obsessed with this too when he hunted Pearson and Toffoli and they didn't exactly make all the difference.
  24. There were other options out there - Andrew Brunette not far off Jack Adams worthiness, Trotz who won't come here, Tippett if he wants the job and heck AV even... All are solid defensive coaches, I hope they did their diligence. Sounds like Tocchet is a player's coach which would be nice for this broken disheartened team.
  25. Ouch, was hoping all the assistants would go. Gonchar and Foote are the only guys I'm excited about. Nice to hear BB talk so highly of Yeo and Cull but Yeo will drag this team down.
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