Provost

That is exactly what I posted a couple of weeks ago. 5 teams wanting to beef up and two teams of players to pick from... that is how it will likely end up being. If each Canadian team wants just 1-2 players for depth... that means the following guys are on expiring contracts from Ottawa and Vancouver: Forward: Stepan Dzingel Anisimov Sutter Pearson Defence: Gudbranson Reilly Benn Pretty much all of those guys are useful veteran depth once cap hits don't matter. If there is a real arms race you add in the guys with a year left in Roussel, Beagle, Austin Watson, and Tierney. Tierney actually costs a real return as he is a good player, but a 5th round pick for either of our two guys is fine to go along with the cap space.

Actually, the wise strategy would be to ditch as many of our spare players as possible for picks, even mid to late round ones. Those picks will be the currency for the expansion draft, no one will want players coming back that they would have to protect as well. Solid #4 D will be available for a 3rd-4th round pick. We could come out of the expansion draft with a D core that looks like: Hughes-Conner Murphy Schmidt-Myers (he probably won't get taken.. but if he was, he could be replaced for cheaper with an equivalent 2nd pairing level player) Soucy-Tryamkin Gudas Two pairings with some offensive upside, Hughes and Schmidt can handle PP duties and be the ones repsonsible for lugging the puck out of the zone and freewheeling... the other guys can focus on keeping the puck out of our end and making up for a smallish and softer forward group. Most of them can skate really well for their size (Gudas being an exception, but he definitely has his uses) That was just me looking up a few teams and who they could expose.. as well as the UFA market. I am sure a little more effort could yield even better D at reasonable prices that we could afford.

Well this season I would be willing to walk down once the 1st period is underway and get a leftover ticket from scalpers for $20 just like I did in the Keenan/early Crawford years. I wonder how much they could actually make if they were allowed 50 people at games when some restrictions loosen. Do you think they could find 50 people who would pay $2,500 each for a ticket for the unique opportunity to be in an almost empty arena.

That is literally the opposite of what you have been saying. You said it is logical progression that the team would be better two years from now. If you agree that Benning is likely to continue making mistakes... getting better isn't the logical outcome.

Ya... I have no idea how that is a complicated connection to make. Even more so, when he literally arguing that the reverse will happen and that history should be ignored or that it actually shows us it is likely that he won't keep making those mistakes. I can't even figure out how that thought process works. We can't assume a rosy future at all. Someone can decide to be optimistic and be hopeful... but that certainly isn't rationale for calling other people out for being objectively wrong because they don't share that worldview.

OK sparky... you were the one calling out other posters for being wrong. Getting your panties in a knot when it is pointed out that you are justifying why everyone else is wrong by using just your imagination is kind of strange. Objective reality is not logical "progression", at least in terms of progression meaning improvement like you are overtly suggesting. The universe is filled with chaos, randomness, decay, and entropy. Virtually no teams in the league have shown any sort of consistent progression like you said it likely and "should" happen. As above, history has shown us that simply is not likely to be the case. Rational people can use the past as a predictor of the future, or not try to predict at all. You are actively saying it is dumb to consider the past and mistakes as a basis for your predictions... but instead want to use just made up fancies and call them logic. Folks have plenty of reason to be negative about the team. It has been one of the worst in the entire league for the entirety of this leadership's tenure. GMs just don't get this sort of runway to be so consistently bad... Benning is one of the longest tenured GMs in the entire league and has one of the worst records of any active GM in the league... certainly much worse than anyone else who has been in their position more than a year or two. That is objective reality. Maybe we get better... maybe he is just bad at his job and the cumulative mistakes will have us starting another rebuild in two years.

We have objective reality and actual results to form opinions on. I never made any predictions on the future, just posted that yours were rooted in your imagination and not based in fact like you insist they are. You countered a post that was stating actual objective facts by just giving magical predictions and assumptions of what would happen in the future. Logical progression in the terms you used it were that it is logical that the team would progress and get better in two years. That just isn't true and I gave some examples of the reason why it isn't. We may get better and we may get worse in two years. It isn't a fallacy to say you aren't able to predict the future, nor it is logical for you to counter real life objective facts with a bunch of made up assumptions. Yes, players get old fast. The average length of a career is 5 years. The league has also gotten younger really quickly and players fall off faster. Lots of real life examples of that. Lucic was a premiere player in the league, when he hit 28-29 he fell off a cliff. Eriksson the same. Players contributing in a meaningful way into their 30's is now an anomaly and not the norm. Horvat is 28 in two years when you grand plan is just starting to take shape, it doesn't leave much runway for many runs at the Cup before he isn't a significant contributor, he is not a speedy player so is one of those guys that is ripe to lose his legs at 30. The rest of your post is just random nonsense. Your definition of me throwing out logic is refusing to predict the future and also to ignore the past. You also said you never mentioned logic, when you literally typed "This is a taking into account a logical progression of the team" as rationale for your whimsical predictions. As a matter of fact, your predictions are highly illogical. You used no logical basis for your "logical" predictions. The ones you used were simply objectively false. The team will have a bunch of new faces (hopefully) in two years, so it doesn't make any sense that they would have learned to play better together by then. We had a defence that knew how to play together last year because they had been with the team a long time. That didn't make them good, and we won't even have that going forward as most of the D faces will be new to playing with each other. I already covered the "teams just logically progress" falsehood... that just isn't true. That isn't a prediction on my part, look at the worst teams over the last decade and most of them have stayed the worst teams. Most of the good teams have stayed good teams. Just a very few teams went from the bottom of the pack to realistic contenders.

Umm wins and losses... that is literally how sports work and are measured and is the entire point. No grey area, there is a winner and there is a loser every game. Moral victories and “better effort” don’t count in the standings. Those are just ways to rationalize losing. Over a very short sample size of losing you can argue “process”. Sometimes just random bad luck occurs in a streak even if you are playing well. no one gets to argue it is just process and it is really the effort that counts for seven years.

Hmmm that is actually a pretty tough call. There has to be reasons for so many stops in such a short time after putting up really solid numbers. On the other side, 1/3rd of our roster is trash and it wouldn’t take much to outplay them. It would be hard to think he isn’t an upgrade at least on our bottom depth guys. Occasionally reclamation projects work, and his cap is low enough it could be completely buried. Heck, just as a trial while Bailey and Motte are out injured is worth a shot just to keep Eriksson out of the lineup.

Yes, it is just an arbitrary number you have thrown out. You just made a couple of random assumptions not based in any reality except your wishful thinking. There is no rational expectation that “the team will have learned to play with each other” in two years... we will have at least as much, if not more, roster churn between now and then as we have had in the past few years. We have to replace half our defence still in that time. What expectation could we have that Benning won’t keep making the same contract and pro scouting mistakes he has had up until now? That is just wishful thinking. There ie no such thing as a “logical progression”. That is some weird fallacy that people invent in their heads to feel better about having a terrible team. Progression isn’t linear at all, as a matter of fact... history shows us that bad teams tend to stay bad a lot more often than a team shows significant linear improvement. We are more likely to be still missing the playoffs two years from now as making the playoffs. You can say we have some better young players now than we did 7 years ago... but our results are the same, and that is the only metric that matters. Players get old fast and come off their ELC and get paid market rates even faster. One of our best “windows” was these most recent years when we had two superstars making no money. We squandered that by having a roster filled with players making millions who wouldn’t get picked up if put on the waiver wire. Horvat is going to be 28 and nearing the end of his prime by the start of your “plan”.. if we don’t start competing for the playoffs for a couple years, it takes a bunch of kicks at the can to make a real run and he could be retired or be overpaid on a bad contract by that point. Everything you said was arbitrary and wishful thinking.

When you factor in winning % and games played... Ottawa is MUCH closer to us than we are to a playoff spot. We are 8-9 points out of a playoff spot right now if you count the pace everyone is playing at, and have to vault over two teams way ahead of us to do it. We need to go on a 7-3 run over the next 10 games just to make it to .500, which will still leave us well out of the playoff picture. We need to sustain a likely .650 winning % the rest of the way to be in a playoff spot. We aren’t competing for playoff spot, we are in the territory of praying for a miracle.

I will one up you.... if we just stay terrible for the next twenty years, our entire roster will be filled with top 10 picks and we will be a powerhouse and win several Cups in a row! That is how it works right? I mean teams (Arizona, Edmonton, Buffalo) can’t be bad for years in a row no matter how many good picks you get! Clearly this is all a plan and we wanted to be near the bottom of the league 7 years into it, just like we were at the start. Just stick it out two more years and it will be like a magical transformation! I absolutely remember when Benning did his first press conference and told us about his 9 year plan to (hopefully) get back to being a regular playoff team. I am glad he convinced all our good players to stick around for that and sign long term extensions at deep discounts to make it work.

Ya... it is a reasonable suspension because they are trying to have no tolerance for head hits and save themselves billions in class action suits... but the player dropped his head at the last second after the hit was committed to.

Pending UFAs for pending UFAs.... Both teams are near the lowest salary caps in the league, so the money moving around isn't a big factor. I guess just a hockey trade. Carolina looks like it is almost a lock for the playoffs (in the playoffs now with several games in hand on teams above them) so may want to start loading up on depth early and get quarantines out of the way. Can someone take our similar players? :D

I think it is entirely possible that the deal is done and Benning is gone within a week, Covid or not... The math on all the modelling makes it pretty clear our playoff aspirations would require an almost miraculous run of games to make it.

We are climbing the rankings! ... I mean not the ones we want to be... but hey, whatever

We could probably run with fewer guys on the active roster and put an extra one on the taxi squad to make it work. It is a little bit of a dream though as I doubt Ottawa is looking to shed him any time soon unless they are getting more value than he is probably worth

Except they are two roster spots for one... so really we still need $700k-$1 million to replace the 2nd roster spot. But ya, I do that deal any day. The guy is pretty ideal for the spot we need filled. I doubt he is available because he is giving them good value for his contract.

Ya, we would have to add. Especially since we would need them to take on some cap to even out the money. Rafferty, Virtanen, Baertschi... for Tierney and a low end prospect to make the contracts even out.

Chris Tierney for Jake is one of the options listed there and would be a massive win for us... we would need them to take a little cap hit to even the money out, but they have plenty of that. He is an excellent 3C option who puts up 40 points a season and kills penalties.

Of course fired... the punch to the junk is just an extra while driving him to the airport. You aren’t even making any sense now. You posted a link which said that Ottawa offered to take Eriksson’s contract if we gave them Virtanen. I quoted your link and said if that was true, and he turned it down he should be fired (and punched in the junk for good measure). Then you responded like you hadn’t even read your own link... and now you are suggestions that that people shouldn’t respond to your link because that isn’t really the subject you want to talk about? Your logic is a little tough to follow here...

I was literally referring to the link I quoted which stated that reports were that in the offseason, Ottawa wanted Virtanen as the sweetener for taking Eriksson. My response was that IF that deal was on the table ever and Benning turned it down, he should be punched in the junk. I stand by that assessment.

If Benning had a chance to offload Eriksson’s full cap for just Virtanen as the sweetener in the offseason, and didn’t do it... he should be fired and also punched in the junk on his way out just for that failure. Virtanen + Eriksson = $8.5 million in cap space. That could have solved almost all our problems with how cheap players were going for. Heck we could have gotten a useful player like Killorn/Johnson from Tampa and had them throw in Foote or Cernak, a 1st round pick, and another asset in order to take that contract off their hands.

No one could have expected this! I can’t read this without hearing an audible “sigh” at the end.