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Provost

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Everything posted by Provost

  1. Ya, who do we really protect? We “can” protect extra guys... but really don’t have to as they are replaceable if we lose them. Horvat, Petterson, Boeser, Miller, Lind, Motte, XX Schmidt on defence is the only one that needs to be protected... maybe Juolevi if we can’t upgrade in that spot.
  2. Ummm trading Motte would mean that we lose one of our only efficient contracts for next season. How does that help us exactly? To replace Mote with a similar player is going to cost us more than what we are paying Motte. The only way I trade him is if a cap dump for next year goes along, like Roussel.... or if a team gives an early 2nd or better I guess, but again the odds of getting better than Motte with the 35th pick is fairly low so why do it?
  3. I thought one of the streaming services would be a player this time. Didn’t know it would be Disney+ It makes a ton of sense for streaming to get into the sports game. Let’s hope what HBO did for boxing, Disney+ can do for hockey.
  4. Are you going to turn to the franchise around by ignoring reality? If you go back and read the thread, you can see why it matters to be realistic (not negative) and how making decisions for the future can positively impact our team’s success and ability to win.
  5. The math gets pretty torturous. It requires us to win at close to double the winning percent we managed so far this season... and teams we are chasing to win at close to half the rate they have been so far this season. If we play at a .600 Pace the rest of the way out (like the last 10 games( that gets us to 58.4 points If they play at .400 they reach 60 points. it isn’t impossible... but virtually so. We also have to hope that Calgary doesn’t win either as they are ahead of us when considering games in hand.
  6. I am totally up for some size and toughness. Just think it isn’t wise to pay through the nose for it. Gudas could be had for close to nothing as he will be exposed in expansion. Tryamkin can be had for nothing but a low cap hit. Will Chicago be able to protect a guy like Connor Murphy or could we pick him up for a 2nd and 3rd we could get moving out rentals this season? That is just quickly thinking about D... I could probably go through bottom six forwards that would be available in expansion for pennies on the dollar. This is not the year to blow you brains out by overpaying for a UFA. We are in a position with a bunch of extra protection slots we don’t really need to use and can get upgrades on in that process. Teams that don’t have that luxury are going to be paying extra in the UFA market to replace the guys they lost. Big tough guys for the bottom of the roster are pretty easy to find commodities. We don’t need one dedicated fighter, we just need a few more guys who are hard to play against and can come to the fore when games get chippy.
  7. We actually don't have tons of cap space after next year. That is a myth that folks have bought into. 2021 Offseason - Sign Hughes, Petterson, and Demko to bridge deals.. probably conservatively in the 3 year range totalling $17 million for the 3 of them give or take a couple million? That will leave us with around $4.5-5.0 million to sign 8-9 more players and only have 3 defence signed (assuming we push the current pro-rated ELC bonuses into next year). So buyouts or trades have to happen just to get to the cap there, no signing 3rd line centres to $3.5 million or more. 2022 Offseason - Extend Boeser for almost a $2 million raise. Motte if he is still here gets a pretty big bump so there goes one of our few efficient contracts. This year we do have a little space (and a lot of holes to fill), but we can't spend that money on any players with term because we have huge bills for extensions coming up and no expectation of the cap rising for several years with the way they did the formula. 2023 Offseason - Extend Horvat and Miller who will be in line for pretty decent raises. Hoglander will roll off his ELC so if he is a top 6, then there is several million more to him 2024 - Uhoh, those bridge deals for our best players is suddenly due. Maybe an extra $6-8 million in raises between the three of them? If we space out when these contracts come due, we have to pay more up front on the bridge deals for the extra years. As money rolls off for veteran contracts, we owe raises to offset that AND have to sign other players to fill those roster spots. The only cap savings is going to be to try to find cheap replacement players. We don't have a lot in the pipeline and guys like Hoglander and Podkolzin roll off their ELCs really quickly and get paid.
  8. Has there ever been an Ottawa player who isn't available? Lowry is currently playing for one of the better teams in the league and with great linemates... Tierney is not. Go look at their career numbers for their output. If you were arguing that we needed to find a player "like" Lowry, sure. Overpaying for Lowry (who may or may not ever become available either) makes him not "free". Cap space is probably the scarcest commodity we have. Especially when we have to sign your new contract extension and still somehow figure out a way to pay Eriksson.
  9. So when you are talking about some placeholders giving you a better chance of being competitive... you weren't talking about our lot I assume? They sure have done a great job of keeping us near the bottom of the standings! We are paying premium dollars for worse players. Are Roussel and Ferland providing more competitive value than Vanek and Vrbata did? That would be news to pretty much everyone. You are making false strawman arguments. No one said to ice an AHL team. Go to each UFA offseason and look at the players signed after July 1st. Plenty of good solid veterans for low dollars and term. Your coaching rant literally had nothing to do with my post as I never mentioned coaching in it.
  10. He is a UFA, so you have to overpay by a lot to get him here. In the 3C role you also need some scoring in my opinion. A guy more like Tierney in that spot works.... he is more akin to the Malhotra spot that you mentioned. Save the big mean size for the 4th line. I don’t want to pay that kind of money just for some physicality at centre. You can get big mean wingers for league minimum.
  11. Time to watch some Vikings episodes I have recorded. If I am going to watch my team get slaughtered... at least I will be entertained! (I just finished the Brent Burns episodes... it was hilarious... “hey that Viking looks just like... holy crap it is!”
  12. So from the comments it seems like I can skip the first period currently on my PVR?
  13. I have no idea what to think about it. Only two lottery spots means there is less chance of being pushed back spots when we inevitably have a hot streak and finish 7th worst in the league instead of bottom 3. It would have been nicer to win a lottery before they nerf the odds though.
  14. Nobody said not to sign NHL “placeholders” to fill slots that kids aren’t ready to. The issue is that you can do that with decent veteran NHLers at low dollars and with little to no term. The vast difference between us and Ottawa/Detroit is that they have a ton of cap room and no real liability going forward. They are right near the bottom of the league and we are near the top and millions into LTIR. It is fine to rebuild and not spend to the cap so you are ready to add players once you are ready. They are building as fast as their kids are ready... and not losing efficient valuable players because they are capped out. They both have many more millions of cap space to play with this summer and extra picks in the early rounds.
  15. I actually did a fairly exhaustive comparison between the different lists and who we would have if we just fired all our scouts and drafted BPA still available from the other lists. McKenzie was actually not one of the better ones. Button and Pronman give us a better crop of young talent. Benning comes out as above average, but if scouting is his forte and the other parts are below average... he isn't "that" far above the general pack of pundits... none of whom even have GM jobs and access to a large scouting staff
  16. Ya, I specifically remember 2015-16 when the California teams were still good. We had lost against them all season. We had a last road trip through all of them to end the season and proceeded to sweep them all and get 6 points. It accomplished nothing except drop our draft position from the worst in the league to 3rd (resulting in Juolevi and not Matthews). One of the heroes... Dan Hamhuis, a guy who shouldn’t have even been here after that trade deadline. So when we “run out of time” to move our veterans at the trade deadline... and the other bottom dwellers make all those trades and are icing half AHL rosters for the final weeks... I can see it happening again.
  17. Oh, you are cute and so optimistic! Picking in the top 3 gives us a great chance to fluke out and get a great player. Clearly, the “Canucks” thing to do will be to go on a run right at the end of the season during meaningless games and manage to put ourselves in to the 8-12 spot for the draft , so we still miss the playoffs by a long shot, but get a crappier draft pick. For those getting excited about our recent improved play. Guess how much closer to the playoffs bar we are than 10 games ago? Exactly zero points closer.... we have lost more ground on everyone except Montreal, who we equalled in points. The other three have moved even farther ahead of us. That is bad news as Montreal started way ahead of us and was less reachable to start with. Edmonton and Winnipeg were closer in reach but have now spread their lead on us. We are still 9-10 points out of a playoff spot once you factor in games in hand. The whole point of the start of the thread was that basically no matter how we play over the stretch (short of being the best in the league and the right combination of other teams losing)... there was no way to make up the ground. Making up at least 10 points in 28 games is virtually impossible with so many games being played between teams ahead of us with guaranteed points that one of them will get on a given night.
  18. Exactly this. When people parrot the “we have to insulate the kids” line from management, they ignore the fact that there are always solid pro players available for cheap and short term contracts. That is especially true the last few years as the league has gotten younger and veterans have been left without jobs. There is value to be had on August 1st instead of July 1st. We have had some of them, guys like Vanek, Vrbata, Schaller. You don’t have to give up term and money for solid pro’s. The added benefit to these short term contracts is if Detroit is terrible the year those contracts expire, they can flip them as rentals for more picks. Where would we be with $10-15 million more in cap space and a bunch more picks/prospects. Trading Vanek for example got us Motte. What if that type of deal had been made another dozen times over 7 years... we should have been able to hit on a couple of them. We kept being told a team has to be built through the draft, but acquiring draft picks we never a priority... quite the opposite. All those 2nd and 3rd round picks that went out are the ones that you mine gold from. It was always short term bandaids at high prices and terms. If you want to filter in kids and develop them, you don’t fill up the entire bottom of the roster with veterans on long term deals who you can’t move out when the kids are ready.
  19. I don’t think that is any sort of context because the question wasn’t “is it good or bad to be one of the worst teams in the league”. It was whether we were or not. I actually think that pulling the plug on the season with the playoffs out of reach would actually be smarter at this point. Trade away the rentals, put some of the young guys into game action. Rafferty and/or Juolevi should be getting some games as an example, as that development would pay off in the long run. I don’t know how anyone could refute the fact we are one of the worst teams in the league. We are. It is easy to measure in sports because there are definable winners and losers.... zero “style” points are awarded. Maybe we aren’t 2-12 bad like we were recently, but almost no team can maintain that level of terrible over a season. With the loser point it is actually pretty hard to not be close to .500
  20. Doesn’t our place in the standings might count? Wins and losses? Tied for 26th in the league in winning percentage this year? 4th worst winning percentage overall during the past 5 years? Is there another metric for good and bad other than winning games or losing games?
  21. Everyone knows what Jake is “capable” of doing. The fact that he doesn’t WANT to do it is really the issue. Green says he wants to have guys who want to be there, that love coming to the rink to play hard every day. That just isn’t Virtanen. Honestly how dumb or lazy do you have to be at this point to not get it. He isn’t being asked to paint a Picasso... when he has the puck, go to the net with it. That is it. When he does that, he scores a lot... or a team mate picks up a rebound or loose puck and taps it in. When he just feels pressure and angles off to the corner or circles around the back of the net, he gives up the puck and doesn’t get a scoring chance. This is why most people don’t trust Benning to lead the team going forward. If Jake went on a hot streak, instead of unloading him to a foolish GM who is enamoured by the potential... Benning is the foolish GM enamoured by the potential. If teams are calling on our players, including Jake... then some of those players should be gone now.
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