Curt

Sure, but Mitts led the tourney that season and won mvp. He was considered to be completely dominant. Cozens isn’t leading the tournament in scoring and it looks like scoring is way up this season. Honestly though, if you go look at the top 3-4 scorers from years past, large majority of them became at least solid good nhl players.

Lol, Casey Mittelstadt?

Valid point.

Yeah, of course. You think I don’t? I just see the most important aspect of his game as his goal scoring. I don’t think his usefulness as a puck carrier or playmaker, or defensive presence, or anything else comes close to his usefulness as a shooter.

Actually, I think that talking about PP scoring when discussing ES play muddies the discussion more than just not bringing assist into the discussion.

Yeah, they do count, I get that. It’s not irrelevant, but creation for others is not Olofsson’s primary skill set. We want him to score goals and playing with Eichel/Reinhart he is bound to pick up assists at a higher rate than if he was playing down the lineup.

Interesting. I don’t necessarily thing he is that good, but with the departure of Krug, I think McAvoy will put up a shocking number of points. Like 45-50 points in a 56 game season.

Yeah, top prospect is vague. I was thinking among the top prospects in hockey. Like among the top 25 or something.

Hall and Skinner both play LW pretty much exclusively. So I doubt we see them together.

Yes, an excellent WJC is always nice to see, especially if the guy is good against the top teams as well as the also rans. However, it’s no reason to drastically change the evaluation of a player. JJP is not suddenly a top prospect. I mean he might be, maybe, but it takes more than this to prove it.

I’m not really against the idea of Olofsson on the top line. I’m just against the idea that he MUST be on the top line. He is an option for that spot, but just one of multiple options.

I get it, he has the physical skills to be a good ES scorer, and it may not be a chronic hot-cold thing for him, but he needs to show me that it’s not. Consistency is what separates the serviceable players from the very good players. He needs to keep playing well, even when the pressure is on. If you go hunting for good stretches on the stat sheet, you can find all kinds of “just ok” players who had 26 game stretches just as good.

Not that your numbers are wrong, but I think it just muddies the issue to keep quoting PP production when ES play is the discussion point. Everyone agrees that he is very good on the PP and should be on the #1 unit. During his best stretch of the season (those 26 games) he was doing pretty well at ES. If he can do that for a whole season, that would be good in the top 6. Though if he is going to have long stretches where he goes cold, that’s not great. I’m not saying he shouldn’t be on the top line, or top 6, but I don’t think he has been so impressive at ES that he simply must be there. There are scenarios where he could end up on line 3 and it would make sense.

He started the season off so poorly that there was nowhere to go but up. In his first 16 games, he had 0 ES goals. After that, he had 7 ES goals in 26 games before getting injured. After coming back from injury in mid February, he had 2 ES goals in 12 games. So during that middle stretch of the season, he was doing pretty well. Scoring at ES at about the same rate that Reinhart and Skinner averaged for the whole season. If he could keep that up for a whole season, that’s acceptable in the top 6.

Technically probably a hire by Matt Ellis for his PD department, but I’m sure KA was in the loop.

Last season VO was placed in an ideal situation at ES. 1st line mins with the two best passers on the team. He scored 9 goals in 54 games. Im not saying that he can’t improve upon that, but if you are worried about messing up what he had going last year, there isn’t much there to mess up. VO scored at about the same rate as Girgensons, Okposo, Johansson, Vesey, and Sheary.

I’d be happy with 85% of the player he was at age 35. That would still be the 3rd best C that Buffalo has had since the tank.

Skinner you can’t, because he has a NMC. Anyone with a base salary of less than that $1.125M, saves you less. Teams have actually done this with players at times, carrying only 22 on the roster. The reason I think it could make more sense this season is because of the taxi squad. Normally I assume that if a player is sent down, they can’t practice with the team, but this season, there is the taxi squad. You just have them report to the taxi squad, which is already traveling and practicing with the team anyway.

Thanks for the additional info. I had thought it was 1.4M, not 1.125M. The rest I understood. You are misunderstanding the point, I think. All the stuff I quoted above is not what was proposed. The idea is not to leave Okposo in the minors all season, or to have him leave the NHL team at all. The idea was to “send him down” to the taxi squad on off days, as a PAPER TRANSACTION ONLY, and then calling him back up for game days. In this way they could save some cap hit over the course of the season. They absolutely would not call someone up to take his place on these off days because it defeats the whole point. I’m estimating that this might be feasible for up to half the days during the course of the season, thus perhaps they could save $0.5M cap hit. The stuff about IR players using up excess cap space is relevant, and I don’t know how much that generally costs a team per season. It’s possible that this is likely to make such a process pointless, but I’m not sure how likely. Ive also said that I think there may be a way to approach this that everyone is comfortable with. It’s certainly not something that I would force through if it was going to create bad blood, as you say.

Ok. Isn’t the max cap savings from having a guy in minors normally $1.4M? Regarding the bolded, how does that work? This is new info to me. You definitely would not be replacing him on the active roster at those times, because the whole point is that it’s only on off days, so why would you need to? The stuff about players on IR is irrelevant because that’s going to happen either way, no?

How so?

Just makes it a little more likely that Boston falters and Buffalo can surpass them. Everything seems to be coming undone all at once for Boston.

He has to clear waivers (would anyone take him? no), then he can be sent to the “minors” which would be the taxi squad that is practicing with the team anyway. Having Okposo in the minors for the whole season would save $1.4M in cap I believe. So if they can have him in the “minors” for close to half the season, on as many non game days as possible then call him up for game days, then maybe they could save $0.5M in cap space, which could be useful wiggle room to add at the deadline.

Agree, he will certainly play to start the season, and will continue to play unless he really stinks it up. This whole discussion just started with whether they would consider sending him to the taxi squad on off days to save a little cap space, purely as a paper transaction.

I mean, I could say the same about your weight placed on Krueger’s words in this recent interview. You are right though that it really only matters what they do, and that the players feel that there is confidence in them.