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Provost

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Everything posted by Provost

  1. No one else seems to think that they are OK with goaltending prospects.... none of their top prospects is a goalie. https://www.nhl.com/news/mock-2021-nhl-draft-buffalo-has-top-pick-seattle-pick-second/c-325164100 https://www.google.ca/amp/s/syndication.bleacherreport.com/amp/2944125-updated-2021-nhl-mock-draft-predictions.amp.html https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.sportingnews.com/us/amp/nhl/news/nhl-mock-draft-2021-sabres-owen-power-no-1-wide-open-draft/5rimj5ar60u51hm3argkq0mna https://hockeybuzz.com/blog/Jeremy--Laura/Nothing-to-see-here-Detroits-goalie-pool-is-shallow/275/111868 https://thehockeywriters.com/red-wings-prospect-rankings-2021/
  2. It hasn’t been announced... it was suggested it might start as player development and maybe take the same kind of path as Ryan Johnson.
  3. Hiring people with experience in their jobs... that would mark a new strategy for the team...
  4. Kempe just has to be better than McCann for the comparison. It would be EP and OJ for Ehlers, Tkachuk, AND Glass as the “trade”. I think Petterson is likely the best player of the bunch at their respective peaks... but then Glass should be progressing to a 2nd line centre as he develops... so that is likely 3 top 6 players for one top 6 player and Juolevi who is probably a 4th-6th defenceman IF things work out for him.
  5. I have seen a couple of Detroit writer and mock draft posts suggesting they need to stock some goalie prospects and might even consider taking Wallstedt with their pick. It is pretty unusual to take a goalie that high, and any goalie is probably a ways away from being a starter as they take longer to develop. DiPietro is still highly rated and much closer to an NHL gig as a back up as soon as 2022. With only a year left on his contract, would Detroit consider DiPietro for an Eriksson cap dump? Detroit could get their goalie prospect AND pick another player to help them in another position. I say it is worth it for us because it actually gives us a chance to sign Petterson and Hughes to long term contracts instead of short bridge deals. There will never be a better time to lock in guys for long term as the cap will be effectively flat for several years and you don't have to price in inflation. It also gives the agent a chance to structure the deal around mandated escrow to ensure their client makes as much take home cash as possible for the same cap hit... where a bridge deal doesn't give as much flexibility. I don't want to be renegotiating both our star players in 3 years.
  6. and he had Boeser way up at #9, higher than the other rankings. If we had used Button's draft lists over the Benning tenure we would have had: 2014- Ehlers, Kempe 2015 - Boeser (he had him 9th) 2016 - Matthew Tkachuk 2017 - Glass 2018 - Hughes In that case we miss on Petterson, but adding Ehlers, Kempe, and Tkachuk instead of Virtanen/McCann/Juolevi more than makes up for it I think.
  7. In most organizations they can do more than one thing at a time without “running out of time”.
  8. Dhaliwal reporting that Muller’s name has come up as an assistant. That would be a good thing.
  9. If Benning could swing that, I would get off the “he needs to be fired” wagon. Ekblad is not expendable to the Panthers, there is no reason for them to trade him in order to get worse. They won’t be thinking “hey we did OK without him”.... they will be thinking “Hey, we managed to be a playoff team without one of our best players... maybe we can do some damage in the coming years if we aren’t unlucky with injuries”
  10. I don’t know enough about the player to figure out if he is an NHLer or not. He seems pretty far down the Rangers depth chart. I think we can probably do better during expansion to get a young guy who is ready to slot into the lineup right away. There should be a number of teams that have a big drop off between their #4 and #5 guy that would make sense to make a proactive trade before expansion to get some assets for that #4 guy they are sure to lose.
  11. There was no need to play Edler 27 minutes a night to secure an extra 5 points at the end of the season. Juolevi and Rathbone needed more looks to give a better idea of offseason needs. Maybe a signed Green would have been more focussed on next season than squeaking out some extra points. Going 1-2-0 instead of 2-0-1 was 4 draft spots difference.
  12. I take Reinhart (with an extension signed) and Ristolainen for our 1st, DiPietro and Eriksson.
  13. Hmmm 9th overall. That is in the range of maybe moving. I wouldn’t be totally adverse to it if the right deal came along.
  14. These guys really don’t want to be there. It is like watching paint dry. Next year they need to have the mascots there doing the draft... at least make it fun TV
  15. Yeesh... it is one thing to be hopeful and excited and another thing to be nutbar factor 10. The kid hasn’t stepped onto an NHL rink yet... let’s keep expectations in the realm of realistic. We have plenty of warriors in team history that have already been great playoff performers, maybe don’t shove them aside quite yet?
  16. You mean a love child of the two of them? or maybe...
  17. Not even remotely true. You said that we beat Toronto twice so they aren’t better. I said that isn’t a remotely reasonable sample size to make that statement... it conveniently ignores our losing record against them going back a while now. One series is also not enough to say one team is better... you can say they were better for that series. If you look at dozens of games over a span of years... that DOES give you an appropriate sample size to make conclusions from. Toronto has been a top team in league standings for several years... we have been a bottom team over that span. Coming up with lame tiny snapshots to tru to argue against objective reality is just pure homerism. They lost in the playoffs again... yep, great I don’t like the Leafs. We didn’t make the playoffs again... so I am not going to be taking a victory lap for being bad enough that we didn’t even get a chance to lose in the playoffs. Be a grown up, the Leafs are a flawed team... but they are currently better than us. We are a flawed team that is performing much worse. Folks mock Toronto’s defence, but it performed a heck of a lot better than ours did. I look forward to a couple of years from now when (hopefully) we can get back to being regarded as the most likely team to bring the Cup to Canada.
  18. Yes they are. You even know it is silly to take two games and extrapolate from that. We were 0-2 against them last year and had a losing record against them this year. More importantly, they have been near the top of the standings over the last few years while the Canucks have been near the bottom.
  19. Over one 7 game series they were... I certainly wouldn’t take them winning over a larger sample size. Over a short sample size there are too many other variables at play to say who is better.... injuries, cold streaks, hot goaltenders, random puck luck, etc
  20. No... I think it means we have a decent chance of being better down the road. There is a thing called “tense” in language that is pretty important to understand. Anyone who says our team is better now is enjoying too many of those fancy cigarettes that made Tryamkin so uncomfortable. You can measure how good teams are by pretty obvious metrics called wins and losses.
  21. I am happy the Leafs lost. At the same time, I think it is a huge logical mistake to somehow suggest that because they lost, we are somehow better? That seems to be the idea here. Those things aren’t connected at all. Our team is worse than the Leafs right now. I would rather have our team going forward than theirs. Folks defend Benning by saying the pandemic and flat cap completely destroyed all his plans. There probably isn’t a team worse off due to an ongoing flat cap for an expected several more years than Toronto is. They signed their big players to huge contracts assuming that cap inflation would make them better deals down the road. That isn’t just a Toronto thing, all teams do it... but Toronto just happened to do it more and at the wrong time. Those contracts instead of getting better over time are going to stay overpaid and badly effect how they can build out the rest of their roster. They aren’t always going to have a bunch of veterans come in and rescue them by playing for low dollars. In our situation, our top guys are coming up for contracts during the worst economic conditions the NHL is likely to be in. Everyone expects there will be an effectively flat cap for the next 3-5 years. Presumably we will be able to negotiate extensions under those new realities. Instead of paying $10 million and $8 million respectively for Petterson and Hughes, we are probably going to be more like $7-7.5 and $6-6.5 (hopefully for longer than a 3 year bridge term). The flexibility that will give us moving forward will be immense IF those two players continue to develop.
  22. I would wait for a reliable source. I am not adverse to trading Schmidt, but only if we get a return for him. Post expansion draft there are going to be a bunch of teams who lost a top 4D and will need to replace that roster spot. After expansion I would think Schmidt has more value than what we paid for him. Ideally we add a top 4D and don’t just subtract one. Hughes-Hamonic Schmidt-Ristolainen (or another RHD Juolevi/Rathbone-Myers Bowie Platoon Juolevi and Rathbone for about 50 games each. See who can nail down that 3rd pairing spot. Hopefully a couple of years of Hamonic bus us time to find/develop a replacement.
  23. Oh the small joys in life... seeing the little spark of hope die in the eyes of Leafs fans. Presumably the finger pointing and excuses will start coming in... if only it wasn't for the refs and injuries it would have been a Toronto sweep!
  24. Except it is not ridiculous at all. If you are rebuilding, sending out a bunch of 1st and 2nd round picks for immediate help that won't be there when you have "rebuilt" is absolutely counter productive to the process. You making absurdist extreme arguments doesn't change that. Nobody every said that a rebuilding team should never trade any picks... you literally made that up on your own. Trade picks for young players who will be club controlled for long term, trade picks for prospects, trade late picks in packages for better picks/prospects. Fine... go wild. Trade picks for immediate short term help? Entirely counter to the rebuilding through the draft "plan" that occasionally gets stated by Benning... when he isn't arguing the opposite of course. It isn't a one off, it has been a pattern of consistently trading away high end picks for diminishing assets. If you look at rebuilding teams they accrued EXTRA picks, not trade away 1st, 2nd, and 3rd rounders regularly. Then add in trading away cheap young prospects on top of that? Sorry man, that isn't "rebuilding" that way any rational person would look at it.. as much as you stamp and hold your breath saying it is so.
  25. Sure a retool "could" potentially work... ours objectively hasn't, and we really haven't even tried that. Now that basically all our prospects have graduated to the team we will again have one of the worst prospect pools in the league... basically DiPietro and this year's 1st rounder as likely to become material NHL calibre and the rest just hopefuls and depth pieces. We will still have a bad roster as well even with all those high picks playing. We can hope for internal improvement from enough of them to make the team better. Based on his history of signings and inefficient contracts... I have zero faith in Benning being able to build around that core effectively. Miller is a good player... but if we are a losing team his entire tenure under club control here (as Benning even suggests we likely will be... that he hopes we are competitive in Miller's last contract year), then making that move was premature and it was a bad decision. If he didn't think we were ready to compete, you don't trade away a 1st round pick for a veteran to be on a losing team. We had plenty (too many) veterans already to "insulate" the kids. We didn't need "tweeners" in the system so spending futures to get them didn't make sense, especially when you were also signing a bunch of veterans as well. What does an "age gap" mean if you are rebuilding and those players will be over the hill by the time you are ready to compete? That was the management marketing line, but it made no sense. There are always veteran players left without a good contract offer as free agency goes along... you don't need to give up important rebuilding assets to trade for "tweeners" who aren't any better but just happen to be 2-3 years younger. Signings like Vanek, Vrbata, Schaller were ideal "rebuilding" signings. Short term, market value or less, solid veteran presence... can be flipped for assets (like Motte) at the deadline if we are still bad that year. Staying with that as a plan and repeating that until we crept out of the cellar (Toronto did it like that) would be totally defensible. Signings like Ferland, Roussel, Sutter, Holtby, Beagle to more money and term than other teams were willing to spend put us backwards because we needed to insulate the kids were just bad decisions that cost us a chance to build on any successes. We then have Toffoli, Stecher, and Tanev could have been signed to efficient under market contracts. If you really need to have veteran "pro's" to help guide the kids, why let Tanev go who was referred to by all the kids as "Dad" and was absolutely the key veteran leadership on defence? How about Stecher who was trotted out to the media after losses as one of our key young leaders and would chew through a wall to win? Signing the most expensive veteran backup possible (even though his stats were already poor), a perennial project in Virtanen, and chasing OEL was worth not signing any of those guys? The veteran character leadership is only a line they trot out when it suits them... they turn around the next time it suits them and say we had to let other veterans go because we need to get younger.... sometimes in the same interview. It is absolutely inconsistent. Heck this year he says we need more speed in our forward group, but used almost all his available cap space (after extensions to the kids) on Pearson who does not have speed and isn't going to be getting faster as he ages to the wrong side of 30. The line was that he is good in the dressing room... well that wasn't very important 6 months before when players who were publicly touted by their team mates as being key in the dressing room weren't even given the courtesy of a contract offer to consider. In the end the lack of vision has left us with bad results. I actually really like Green as a head coach. He says he wants to play a relentless forechecking aggressive speed game. He wants players that love to play the game and "want to be here". That is why players like Hoglander and Motte can excel under his systems... it is also why the bottom 6 veterans and guys like Eriksson get destroyed, they just don't fit that style. They don't have the wheels and can't make the passes to transition quickly.
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