elvis15 Posted October 1, 2014 Share Posted October 1, 2014 There are bantam players bigger than this kid. Watched him in Penticton...impressive skill. He'll get destroyed in every NA league most likely because he won't be able to play a lick of defense. If you thought Linus Omark was a long shot .... He did look good in Penticton on a few occasions. He is very small though, at only 5'8" and 163lbs (via HockeyDB, he's listed at 5'9", 141lbs on ESPN but he looked bigger than 141 in Penticton). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
touchable Posted October 2, 2014 Share Posted October 2, 2014 With the core Burke and Nonis built. Gillis was never able to provide ample depth for the core to help them win. For example, the year we went to the finals saw us carrying only 4 NHL centers - Henrik, Kesler, Malhotra and Lapierre via trade on trade deadline. As soon as Malhotra went down, we somehow managed past all three rounds of Western Conference Playoffs on the strong play of our top guys. Then Kesler got injured and Henrik had a wonky back. Manny came back to play with one eye. It was not enough to match the depth Boston had with Krejci, Bergeron, Kelly, Peverley, Campbell and even Seguin (technically). We never had a center play on the wing who could take over for Manny when he was injured and that hurt us a lot when we finally ran into a team with depth. He never fixed this problem in the ensuing years - adding Samuelsson only to subtract Hodgson to carry only 4 centers once again into the 2012 playoffs. In 2013, he seemed to have given up completely on the notion of depth by letting Lapierre go and signing Richardson and Santorelli, but still not addressing the depth issue. In addition, the other key downfall of Gillis's regime was his inability to find young talent through the draft. This is how you remain competitive in today's NHL - only Hodgson made it during Gillis's 5 year tenure. That's horrible. As others pointed out, having ROR or Marcus Johansson instead of Schroeder from 2009 would have changed our fate in 2011. He had no draft picks in 2010 until McNally. His drafting turned around a little with Jensen, Gaunce and the 2013 draft picks, but it was too little too late. The team was already lacking depth and young talent that could support the core, and it went down with the hiring of Tortorella. Poor drafting is a cardinal sin for any GM because it really handcuffs the team's depth and ability to make trades. Gillis had a team that went to the Finals, who based on their talent, would have won with some depth and help, but Gillis failed to provide that. How did a Tkachev ELC thread get turned into a Gillis hate/2011 nostalgia thread? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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