Provost

YA!! typical Green!!! Screw that guy for just demoting Juolevi for no reason and having Michaelis in the box anyways! He should be fired for that move... totally the last straw!

“I’ll take ‘Reasons people give for not kissing Oldnews’ for 500 Alex...”

See, now there is something you can be proud of! Don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t have skills! You go brother!

Don’t be so hard on yourself dude... there is plenty of time for you to learn how to be honest about your mistakes and admit them. I mean, it hasn’t happened yet... but it is never too later for anyone.

Clearly a move is happening where we need that extra $150k in cap space? ... or we had an injury and need a centre? ... or we want to showcase him for a trade? ... or I have no idea what is going on anymore and none of it has any discernible rhyme or reason.

Maybe my estimate is coloured by being basically a lone voice in the forest in the middle of last season by daring to suggest that his short hot streak was much more likely to be a statistical blip than a sign of progression to a consistent 25+ goal scorer. Pages and pages of how wrong I was, with plenty of name calling included. I don’t recall many of the posts agreeing with me. You are welcome to go look back and add it up to find 40% of folks. Maybe more folks would have been fine trading him, but only at a ridiculous price compared with his worth. There are still probably 40% of folks who still think he is doing well and/or going to bust out still.

Man, if we could get Hal Gill for $2 million a season on the roster right now... I take that deal in a heartbeat. The guy was a decent NHLer. We don’t need Tryamkin to be an elite D for it to be a huge win. If he comes in and can be a steady 3rd pairing defensive guy who can occasionally lean on opposing players... that would be amazing for the $2 million we would be paying him. The downside is we get another Benn, the upside is that he turns out to be able to play 18-20 minutes a game and can partner Hughes while 5v5 and Hughes gets his extra 4-5 minutes on the PP.

I think so to... low cap hit, good depth. Even in Covid times he should be moveable. I think we should be trying to trade him, Sutter, and Pearson to a US team right now and maximize our potential to bank some cap space. They will be less attractive later at the trade deadline to US teams due to quarantine delays... so our market will be limited to Canadian teams. I would “like” Canadian teams loading up for the playoffs to have to be taking on Roussel and Beagle!

Sorry.. I just saw the notification and responded... hadn’t read all the other responses.

That isn’t how it works. You don’t have to waive the person “just in case” beforehand and hope to get the guy you put a claim in. Chatfield would be put on waivers if our claim was successful and the other person would be sent to the minors. It is a super simple move to make. The only question is whether you think Guhle is an upgrade on the person you waive, and if you have the contract space to add him and IF the person demoted doesn’t get picked up. Nothing about it is complicated. These kind of moves happen dozens of times a year.

Ummm... demote Chatfield or Hawyrluk to the Taxi Squad and then someone to the AHL (Eriksson, Rafferty, Sautner, Brisebois?) Not sure what the complication is? I literally said that he was an upgrade on Chatfield and Brisebois as depth call ups. If one of them got claimed off waivers because we got an upgrade.... shrug?

In the summer it was probably 90% on the "He has turned a corner and will be Cam Neely now" side of things and 10% "Trade him now while his value is the highest!" side. I don't know that Pujujarvi was the best deal we could have gotten (maybe), I would have packaged him up with a cap dump to keep guys like Toffoli and Stecher.

How would this guy not get picked up at his age and cap hit? Is Anaheim just trying to shed a couple contracts since they are at 50? Are they trying to sneak him through? If he falls to us and we don’t put in a claim, something is strange in Who-Ville. He isn’t exactly what we need, But is an upgrade on the Chatfield/Brisebois level guys we have as depth injury call ups. Certainly if we think we can send out Benn as a rental, this could even be a body to fill a hole the rest of the season and be exposed in expansion.

Yes, probably about 63 points.. give or take a couple. The problem is that we need 2 teams to entirely crap the bed, not just one. Those teams ahead of us play each other a lot too, so it is hard to catch up to the pack. The only path to that is us playing a 30 games stretch at a rate that would win us the President’s Trophy in any normal year AND we need Toronto, Montreal, and Winnipeg to absolutely dominate Edmonton and Calgary.. but not us. Yes if we became the best team in the league tomorrow, and some other teams ahead of us become the worst teams, we have a chance to be on the bubble. We are 6 games below .500 and our nearest playoff spot is 3 games above .500. That is a lot of ground to make up in 30 games... like a historic amount.

I appreciate the positivity... maybe not the best sign when several of the top 10 things include the phrase “mixed bag” though :D My list: 1. Hoglander is a huge surprise, I thought if he made the team this seasons it was mostly going to be because of cap reasons. No one can say he hasn’t deserved a spot regardless of his contract. 2. Demko is as good as can be expected. Good enough that we can really hope Seattle takes Holtby (unlikely unless he can turn around his numbers the rest of the year). 3. Rathbone would be on my list of positive things. He was our D prospect with the most likely top 4 potential. His start in the AHL has even upped those odds. 4. I would combine our other prospects into another positive. The AHL is weaker than normal because of so many players on taxi squads... but our prospects that are there are doing really well. Woo, Lockwood, Lind, Gadjovich, Jasek are all showing that they have some chance of becoming NHLers. Any couple of those working out to even be NHL regulars would be a drafting/developing victory that we haven’t really had for a long time. 5. Tryamkin. With an NHL calibre coach, this guy has blossomed and become a pretty dominant force on his team, eating up huge minutes and playing a physical style. If he can keep up with the speed in the NHL, he will be an incredible add next season. At the price tag of 2-3 years @ around $2 million per, if he is only a 3rd pairing guy that can complement a more offensive partner, that is still a win. He is not expansion eligible so that it valuable. 6. The last positive point is that the season is only 56 games at most so the pain will be less than if it were a normal 82 games season with. We can look forward to the draft pretty quickly.

BUT Holtby and the other goalies with more points than Jake clearly have more oZone starts than he does, so his lack of production is entirely understandable.

No active GM has as bad a record and kept their job as long as Benning. Verifiable fact.

The OP is probably not the person to be pulling up old posts to show folks being wrong. Something about Glass houses... throwing stones.... We are quite a bit worse than Calgary and Montreal. We don’t get to be smarmy about anything. With so few games played, the number of games in hand matter. It is a huge gap when you account for that. Also, it is tough to say Toffoli is a cause of Montreal having a losing stretch, he is providing great value for them. Calgary’s problem isn’t Tanev or Markstrom... and not many folks argued we should match those contracts (especially in term) anyways. Again, Tanev and Markstrom aren’t their problem. Go look at Rittich and see how much better they are with Markstrom.

Can you elaborate on the math with that? 15-0 against 3 teams and 0-15 against the other three teams? That doesn’t seem to work out, because it would rely on those teams playing against easy other and neither of them winning... they have so many guaranteed points between them because they all play other cumulatively than we play against them. For us to go .500 the rest of the season and get into the playoff bar means that we would get in with 50 points, well under .500. That is pretty impossible. 62 points is probably the low end of the cut off. There are 5 teams above us, and one team below us (barely below us). It is REALLY hard for 2 of those teams to go WAY under .500 in order for us to pass them with only 50 points. It would require us winning every game against the bubble teams as well as Toronto and Montreal winning all their games against the same teams.

Exactly... those I think are exactly the types of guys we need in that spot. I had thought Tierney was a great target in the offseason if we could have given some assets to them as a sweetener to dump a little cap apse and get Tierney back. Of course if we end up with another 2C as BPA out of this draft instead of a D, having Horvat in that 3rd line spot would mean we are a really hard team to match up against. Really easy to integrate young wingers with centre depth like that.

I don’t think he is a cap dump... but he doesn’t seem to be a great fit with the makeup of the team as it stands. He has really been sheltered, playing 4th line minutes... and still getting exposed defensively a lot. The more he gets sheltered, the more Horvat has to take up the slack. Ot doesn’t hurt to keep him as a 13th forward for the time being, but not a big enough loss to worry about if we can use him as a sweetener to dump some cap or get a more useful asset back.

Yes! That is the other piece of why 1040 was better. Better hosts and better guests. Ferraro, Button, Mackzenzie (now retired)... there were a bunch of folks. Even having a guy like Farhan pop on for a chat.

Ugh, I hadn’t seen the updated version of that. That screams “Fire the GM” pretty clearly. Blame a parade of players and coaches if you want, but the common denominator has been the guy running the show. A rebuild/retool should show “some” forward momentum in 7 seasons, not the reverse. Somehow we have managed to blow the advantage of having a bunch of high picks who mostly turned out pretty well, by offsetting that with bad trades/UFA signings. It is a results business, as much as folks can trumpet the “process”... Benning is the longest serving GM with a sub .500 career winning %. The only guy close is Dorian and that guy gets a skeleton budget to work with and we spend to the cap every year without any better results.