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-AJ-

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Everything posted by -AJ-

  1. While I do agree that the Hart needs to consider more than point production, I think this year of all years would be one of the more unusual ones to give it to the guy who didn't lead the league in scoring. I'm not sure I've seen a guy drag his team to success in my 20 years of watching more than McDavid did and he scored at the highest rate we've seen any player score in about 25 years. What's more, offense actually went down in the NHL this year and McDavid still smashed any reasonable expectations. Without him, I wouldn't be surprised if the Oilers were bottom 5 in the NHL. Without MacKinnon, I think the Avalanche are still a deadly team with the likes of Makar, Toews, Girard, Grubauer, Rantanen, Landeskog, Burakovsky, etc. and probably comfortably make the playoffs. See Nikita Kucherov in Tampa for a similar comparison. Edmonton's one big failing is that all they have is McDavid (with one big helper in Draisaitl) and he still brought them to the playoffs. I don't believe the Oilers will ever succeed in the playoffs unless they get a deeper offense, but playoffs aren't part of the discussion regarding the Hart.
  2. I would agree with this. I would prefer MacKinnon simply for his playoff play. His regular season play is still excellent. That said, as you said, McDavid deserves this award since it doesn't at all consider playoff play.
  3. Want the Islanders to beat the cap-circumventing Lightning, but my gut tells me the Lightning will face the Avs or Knights in the finals this year.
  4. I'm not sure how relevant this is to the discussion, but one of the big things I see that holds back Hughes defensively is his shot blocking. Makar has the same issue IMO and probably shouldn't win a Norris until his shot blocking goes up a bit. Last year, Hughes blocked 0.6 shots per game, which increased to 0.8 this year. Even still, the average top pairing defenseman is around 1.5 blocked shots per game. I don't think Hughes needs to really reach that (unless he hopes to be Norris level one day), but I would at least like him to be a bit more defensively minded at times and maybe see that increase to 1.0 to 1.2.
  5. To the question of who will win, it will probably be Hedman, but who should win? Fox for sure. Fox was better offensively and defensively than Hedman this season IMO. Hedman has been incredible in years past, but his defensive game was pretty average this year from what I can tell. Mackenzie Weegar is also a dark horse. He won't win it, but he really should be at least top 10 in voting this year IMO. Incredible defensively and very solid offensive numbers too. A very Slavin-like season for Weegar.
  6. Our PP was bad, but in comparison to our 5v5 offense, it actually wasn't that horrible. Our PP ranked 25th in the NHL and our overall offense ranked 24th. That suggests that the PP was a bit worse than our 5v5 play, which isn't great for Brown, but not brutal either. As you said, our PK was 17th, but our 5v5 defense ranked 26th in the NHL, which would suggest that either Brown or the players were doing something right on the PK. Our special teams weren't great, but in the context of the rest of our overall play, they weren't really dragging us down more than our regular 5v5 play was IMO. The one gripe I had with Brown I will say is that I would have preferred more variety on the PP though, as the plays Brown set up were good, but predictable once you keep doing them over and over again. Either way, I'm not a big supporter of him or anything and do welcome some change if we do go with a new special teams coach.
  7. I actually feel the top three are good choices--all the same as my top 3. Here's my top 5: 1 Varlamov 2 Fleury 3 Vasilevsky 4 Grubauer 5 Saros
  8. Hmm. I was in the minority that didn't think Brown was that bad, but am perfectly fine moving on if we do. I do feel Baumgartner should probably not have been re-signed though. Very happy to see Clark back though.
  9. I'm not really that irritated that we didn't sign Toffoli, but am that we didn't even approach him or talk to him.
  10. I think it's probably likely tbh. Montreal already has 2500 fans in attendance at games for the playoffs.
  11. TBH, I think $3M is the max I would consider. I've been a long-time Edler fan, but he really took a huge step back and at his age, any bounce back will probably be somewhat mitigated by aging. I'm hoping for a $2M deal at 1 or 2 years, though I recognize that might be below market value.
  12. Great point. Too often people look back at decisions without considering the situation at the time.
  13. I'll be honest, while I'm not a Benning hater, it does kind of piss me off how often he and his team fail to even communicate with pending UFAs. Shouldn't be that hard to at least say something.
  14. Fun fact: Out of all active NHL players right now with at least 100 NHL games, Roussel is 4th in PIM/game at 1:48 in penalties per game--1004 PIM in 554 games.
  15. I factored in points, points-per-game, +/-, blocked shots, takeaways, giveaways, CORSI and shorthanded points. I also weigh some things a bit differently, such as blocked shots and takeaways, which are weighed the most. It's not perfect, but it usually gives me pretty reasonable results somewhat close the actual voting.
  16. Just spent a ton of time digging into stats for the Selke and I was kind of shocked to discover that both Matthews and Marner are actually very solid defensively. Of these three options, Barkov is my #1 choice this year. Barkov ranked 2nd on my list, Stone was 3rd, and Bergeron was 6th.
  17. Not often Canada even has the opportunity to go on a Cinderella run, but it's happening this year!
  18. I think both Spurgeon and Slavin are more deserving than Matthews, and not because I dislike the Leafs. My pick is Spurgeon.
  19. I always perceived it as a leadership award, with bonus points given for off-ice stuff, but with the Messier award, maybe it's shifting.
  20. Toronto media is suggesting trading Marner. We're not alone with some crazy media suggestions.
  21. The playoffs are heavily skewing the opinions of fans, I think. McDavid will and should win in a landslide. Playoff performance is completely irrelevant for this award.
  22. Was there even playoffs in their division this year? I thought they were cancelled. Regardless, I will agree that they may lose much of their best players, so getting more is good news.
  23. I would contest this bit--the .589 point percentage is the 3rd highest out of eight Comets years. Quite respectable I'd say, albeit not amazing or anything.
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