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Provost

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Everything posted by Provost

  1. Yes... a step back because they had a bad roster. I think we may be defining what a bad roster is very differently. I consider lack of depth, lack of the right role players, and overall lack of winning games as a bad roster... regardless of any great individual pieces we have. If you think great high end talent pieces to build on, regardless of on ice success makes something "not a bad roster".. then I agree with you, I just don't define it that way. I would rather have our bad roster than a lot of the other bad teams in the league because we at least have some key pieces, and you need the elite talent to win... and that talent is a lot harder to find than the right players to surround them with. We could be very much like Toronto and Edmonton, who have turned a corner by figuring out those right extra pieces after years of having badly balanced teams and no success.
  2. Boy, Tinordi is a guy that I really wanted back when he was still in the minors. I thought he would be a really dependable Willie Mitchell type player Just another guy who has the tools but couldn't put it together.
  3. Ummm... Gaudette has been stapled to the press box and isn’t producing at all. If that is the rousing success outside the top end of the draft, you have made my point pretty eloquently. Our “steal” can’t hold down a 3rd line role when the alternative competition is an aging journeyman in Sutter who could be waived and not picked up by most teams in the league. Yes, Tampa is excellent at drafting. That is why they get an A and Benning doesn’t. that is how grades work, you don’t get to discount someone for being good. Go around the league and you will find several teams with guys selected later in the draft who are playing pivotal roles for their teams... we don’t have that. Benning has been inconsistent. As soon showed in a couple of threads... he has barely beaten the pack of random prospect ranking lists. Of all his picks, Petterson is the clear win. Hughes gets picked by almost everyone at that spot... Virtanen and Juolevi get replaced by either Ehlers/Nylander and Tkachuk by almost every other list. Benning is hitting about 50% on those top 10 picks compared with everyone else. 50% isn’t an “A”
  4. I have no idea what the right call from ownership could be right now, aside from they have to do “something” even just as optics. I don’t think firing the coach is a great idea unless they just throw in an interim organization guy like Smyl in to ride out the season and no intention of him being the guy going forward. Green didn’t suddenly forget how to coach, he doesn’t have the same horses as last year... but also maybe he has been tuned out. I think the GM is the guy on the hot seat right now and a replacement is going to want to pick his own coach. At the same time, aren’t we better off waiting for as many GM candidates as possible before replacing Benning? More guys will become available after the season. Again, is there an interim guy you trust more to run the deadline offloading of contracts more than Benning. To me, the easiest and safest plan is to find a respected hockey guy and make him the President. It is a meaningful change which shows that Benning and the coaches have appropriately lost some of the autonomy and trust of ownership with their objective lack of success. It also puts a guiding hand on the rest of the season to avoid more mistakes. I floated the idea of Larionov as team President a few weeks ago. It doesn’t have to be him, but someone of that ilk who is respected in hockey circles and can bring the team to the next level.
  5. Come up with some evidence for your belief that he is doing better than just "above average" in his drafting to deserve higher than a B. A "B' means pretty decent... though not excellent. How many later picks are making meaningful contributions at the top of the lineup? What percentage of his top 10 picks would be drafted at the same spot or higher if a redraft was done? How much did he fare better than the other draft lists in the years he picked the players he did? I did a bunch of that work and he came out above average, but not excellent. Where is the later round steal like Tampa always gets? Who outside of the first couple rounds is at the top of our roster? for Tampa half their top contributors were picked outside the top of the draft... Point picked in the 3rd round, Palat picked in the 7th round, Killorn picked in the 3rd round, Cirelli picked in the 3rd round, Kucherov picked right at the end of the 2nd round (56th overall). Save the "A" grades for the actual excellent draft records... not for the "above average" one Benning has. Do some actual legwork to support your opinions.
  6. Ya, the difference isn't as stark as folks make it out to be. Benning has also traded away lots of draft picks even when we weren't in a winning window. Getting to pick players in the top 10 is a lot more sure to get legit NHL players than picking at the very end of the 1st round because you are winning the President's Trophy and making long playoff runs. Take last year's draft as an example... take away a top 10 pick and it is entirely likely that we don't get any NHL games out of the players we selected, or at least no meaningful contributors. In no world of rational opinion can folks still be pinning our lack of success on Gillis like some are. It is 7 years since he was fired.
  7. I don't know how anyone can argue that a team that is consistently near the bottom of the league doesn't have a bad roster? The height of success in recent memory was being a bubble playoff team last year.. and if Covid had not rescued us by shortening the season when we had injuries, we were trending towards missing the playoffs again. We can have individual great players and still have a bad roster. Look at Edmonton and Toronto... they had better high end talent than we did but terrible rosters overall that couldn't win. It took them several years to swap out pieces and turn themselves into better teams.
  8. Here is a link with the discussion of the draft being pushed back to 2022. With us looking at a top pick, I would fully endorse this. Some chance to actually scout and have a bit of a better idea who is developing will really give us a better shot at picking the right guy. Right now it is a bit of a crap shoot. https://www.tsn.ca/nhl/video/~2133098
  9. Hopefully they don’t change the draft odds (as they are discussing now) which could lower our odds... but the top end of the draft is high on D, so we should get a good player. Power, Edvinsson, Clarke, Hughes... one should be available in our draft range. https://www.tsn.ca/blueliner-owen-power-tops-mckenzie-s-first-2021-draft-ranking-1.1561354
  10. That Pulujarvi for Virtanen trade that folks were poo-pooing at the start of last season would be looking REALLY good about now...
  11. Oh sorry... I thought you were actually honestly trying to figure out an explanation. I didn’t realize that you had decided that Green is a terrible coach, and are just looking for numbers or reasons to back that up. My mistake. Yes, the coach that had them last year when they had their success, and had the team putting in a consistent left of hard work and effort each night (as remarked by many opposing coaches)... he just forgot how to do all that over the break since the playoffs. It is all on him and nothing to do with the very useful players that left, and the fact almost every player had a career year last year and it was inevitable for some of them to step back from that.
  12. It just isn’t unusual... I am not sure why the need to reach for explanations. Go look at stats for most players... and they have wide variation from year to year... consistent performers are far rarer. If it was two guys who had been consistent performers for several years and then had a precipitous drop off at exactly the same time (and weren’t on the same line... so one player dragging down his linemates wasn’t an easy explanation).... then maybe sure, look for some less obvious explanation. This isn’t that situation.
  13. Jake didn’t actually have a good season last year. If you look at the splits, it was really just an amazing small stretch in the middle of the season when Roussell came back from injury onto that line. He had a few weeks almost a PPG pace. February, March, and the playoffs were awful for him, and he came into last season in trouble day 1 of camp and didn’t pick it up until a couple months into the season... so it isn’t a matter of this season. The small stretch of great play was the anomaly, and not the entire rest of his career, which has been pretty consistently sub par. I think folks ignoring the bulk of his play were setting themselves up for disappointment so looking for other, more exotic, explanations isn’t really necessary. Gaudette has health problems, and also doesn’t have any long resume of success... players have career years and drop off to nothing all the time. It is more usual than a player maintaining play consistently.
  14. It isn’t a “try” development league, it is a “do” and win league. You can parse and try to explain away things, but the record is unavoidable. No GM with a consistent losing record gets to keep their job nearly this long. Benning has been given years longer than guys with similar records. The GMs that get an A for amateur scouting are the ones who are picking late and are also consistently getting significant contributors in the later rounds. Benning hasn’t done that. You only get so much credit for finding good players at the very top of the draft when the entire range is a matter of picking a guy a couple spots earlier or later than his expected draft ranking. Missing on half of those top picks (Virtanen and Juolevi) who would be taken way later in a redraft happened doesn’t earn you top marks.
  15. Well we are due for a win, no team in the league loses EVERY game... Of course I have been saying this for a while, and I have been wrong. Even if we do win, we aren’t closer to the playoff bar because one of Montreal or Winnipeg is getting points, and possible even Calgary.
  16. Most people aren’t extreme at all I find... a few folks just use those types straw man arguments to make them seem so by responding to their posts in ludicrous fashion to try to farm “likes”. I personally give Benning: B in amateur drafting C in pro evaluation/trades/signings D in cap management and allocation F in overall results and wins Guess how many GMs with a career average of less than .500 have jobs 5 years into their tenure? Just Jim. The next longest tenured loser is Dorian who was hired in 2016 and isn’t allowed to spend any money. Chayka and Botterill are other recent losing GMs who were both hired long after Benning and aren’t with their teams. Numerous other guys have been hired and fired since Benning and have had better records. The market indicates Benning has gotten a longer leash with less results than any of his peers.
  17. You throw him to another team as fast as you can, like he is on fire... let them get burned when he reverts back to being what he has been the bulk of his career. Go look at his production in the last calendar year.. it has been abysmal and it isn't just a slow start to this season. He has been bad for a long time, and if you take out that short stretch in the middle of last season where he was on fire at almost a PPG... he hasn't shown any sort of material improvement in his career. He is 9 points in his last 52 games (or a 14 point pace for a 82 game season). That isn't just an anomaly, especially since that is pretty much his level his entire career. (13-25 points a season aside from his offensive outburst in Dec/January last year) His stretch of current bad play is 3 times as long as the short heater he went on last season... Somehow people think of that tiny few week sample size as the true indicator of him as a player, and not the much several years long one we have before and since those weeks? We should really have seen enough to know what he is by now... some magic transformation keeps getting even more and more remote, and if it doesn happen, it really doesn't seem like that would be on this team.
  18. Ahhh... the steady Filip Chlapik, it is amazing he is on waivers!! Just kidding, for the first time in a while after some decent players being sent down, this is a name I don't even recognize.
  19. He got fired for being an idiotic anti-masker... so no more fat guy singing anymore...
  20. I corrected the Pulujarvi one as I somehow transcribed it wrong. As for Ryan Kennedy, he has been listed as a senior writer and editor for years on that site and his rankings are the only ones I have found to be available for that whole time period... so you are welcome to go find a consensus ranking for each of the years and provide them. I definitely take Button’s group and the one from The Athletic above Bennings. You could create a combined consensus list using an algorithm weighting their historical track record and probably end up with a great list that does better than anyone’s scouting department. If you include all the lists that I excluded because I couldn’t find them for every year and just count the occurrences... you probably end up with. Nylander, McCann Konecny/Boeser (basically tied) Tkachuk Vilardi Hughes
  21. Getting rid of those players doesn't put us back at all. Half of them are on expiring contracts anyways, and the other are a year away from being UFAs. The expansion draft and another UFA market with no money in the system would provide ample opportunities to replace those players with better and/or cheaper players. We would likely be in a better position next season when it counts. As it stands with all those players and the need to pay big raises for Petterson, Hughes, and Demko, as well as covering the $4.7 million in pushed ELCs... we would be taking a giant step backward because we would have to lose even more depth than we did this past offseason.
  22. Seems reasonable once we hire Larionov to be our team President.
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