triumph_communes

1st round picks are undervalued in the league. Unless your compete window is closing in 1-2 season, or the acquiring player is still future RFA, trading a 1st is a huge mistake.

Are we buyers or sellers? ? Sellers market right now. Some names are popping up that make for good hockey trades, and either acquiring cap dumps or hockey trade is what Botterill has shown us he can do. I think the big kicker is what to do with Larsson/Girgensons/Vesey? If we want to win we need to keep at least the first two, preferably all three. But their rental value won't be any higher. Larsson ought to fetch a 1st+B prospect

Toronto is not good. That defense will cave sown the stretch like it did tonight Florida is considering selling at the deadline. Those are the two teams between us and 3rd in Atlantic. The hope isn’t dead yet.

Risto has skyrocketed his trade value this game. If that shift with his offensive zone check and then backcheck to save the goal wasn’t it, how about that play?

How the fk was that not too many men

Trochek would be a great compliment to Skinner. Two guys who can’t pass creating havoc Make it happen!

Toronto’s defense is so bad lol

I was wanting Foote ?

Whole problem with the team is #2OA center pick can’t play center, so we’re wallowing looking for a 2C

Trochek is a great get thought he was untouchable. Still curious why his game has fallen so much. Marchessault is a great player, they’re trying to get rid of him before he hits the age 30-34 part of his contract, but I doubt he’s a vet we’d be sore about. Okposo fell off the cliff right away at 30, but a lot of that is concussion. Neither are big guys though. Looks like most forwards coming through the system have size though. Makes a return of Sheary pretty much out of the question if it wasn’t already.

Trochek was a total untouchable as of last season. Curious why the fall off?

The last locker room cancer. Years too late. ♋️

no way Miller nets Cirelli

I don’t understand how you could trade Risto to Tampa for Cirelli and make the cap work. The entire team other than Kucherov and Point have NMCs

Boudreau is a good coach. I'd rather have Krueger, but that's a silly move

BYE FELICIA Imagine all that cap-space if he were to just drop his contract so he could sign a cheaper one elsewhere.

The fancy stats for Scandella were the very bottom of the league... up until they were at the tippy top of the league

A joke of an offer sheet to get the process done in Carolina. He turned down others.

Any pick 3rd round or later is really not worth losing a body that forces a player in Rochester to have to play up before they're ready. The drop-off in pick value is exponential. They aren't worth it.

Ya'll keep dreaming about Cirelli signing an OS, when not even Aho would sign one for Montreal, and players like Zucker has Buffalo on his 10-team NTC. That isn't speculation. It's whiny dreaming. I can hear the lisp when I read it.

If that’s the price for Zucker, Botterill isn’t fixing this team on a trade.

Didn't he quit immediately after we sold off the remaining of our talent for picks? Theory doesn't jive with the timeline. Murray didn't waste all of our assets until well after Patty left.

What? How on earth can you make this statement? Botterill has yet to 'overspend' on a UFA target, and has signed nobody except Eichel and Skinner, a play driver (albeit streaky), to a long-term deal. Every forward he has acquired has been a complimentary cap dump that other teams have seemed at least content with getting rid of-- and most teams don't get rid of their play drivers. These acquisitions cost us nothing in trade capital or long-term commitment and everyone is coming off of the cap at the end of this season. All of his draft picks are too young to make any credible assessment for. Also, on the topic of play drivers, Mittelstadt was always one of those players for the leagues he played in. Just because he lost his touch when the physicality of his competition amped up to 11 doesn't undermine this-- and his recovery since being demoted to the AHL points to exactly the jump in physicality drowning him being his only issue. He is a play-driving player or he's nothing. And he was an amazing play-driver in the WJC back when he couldn't even do a pull-up. One off-season of babyfat conversion isn't changing that. When Botterill trades in the family farm for Evander Kane, or gives huge contracts to UFA's like Moulson and Okposo, then you have enough material to judge Botterill on. But you can't. You can hardly judge Thompson when he was rushed into the NHL by both St Louis and Buffalo due to a large number of injuries, and has been LTIR his entire first year of expected output. If you look at Botterill's work and think the last couple of years were 'the year' then you aren't on the same timeline he is. His first year he got the best UFAs he could sign in Buffalo of the lot, and the superstars didn't bite, and the trash that did retired from the league. He then went to option B and at least got guys that might get another contract (Sheary, Vesey, etc.), but that doesn't make up for the total lack of depth we have.

Sam hater disclaimer-- Sam plays better away from Eichel. I think this is a mental problem of Sam's and if he was elite he would have gotten over it by now, but the reality is he defers to Eichel so much that he forgets he can play hockey himself. Our coach has kept them together every minute of the season at even strength though, so it's easy to forget this.

Our defense isn't bad (barring Bogosian minutes). Miller was the weak link, but has come back to his expectation. McCabe still has dunce moments. Jokiharju and Dahlin aren't even 20yo and if you compare them appropriately, they are doing amazing. This has been a great season to watch as we rarely are hemmed in our own zone. Does nobody remember Bylsma hockey? We would sit in our own zone for half the game and our only goals came from breakaways. Now teams respect us, let us break out, and play 1-2-2 jamming it all up because our offense is so thin and they know one of our dunces is going to eventually make a mistake. Our starting goaltending spent half the season being bad, started to play average, then hurt himself. Our back-up goaltending has been monumentally bad. Any team is going to struggle with that. The lack of depth on offense, especially for a team that had multiple top-6 players get injured, is going to struggle. I'm not sure what people were expecting? Even though this is year-3 of Botterill, we are depending upon Murray's picks to step-up at this point and he only has one guy who made it (a 7th rounder..) beyond the 2OA picks. The problem here is people's expectations on this season after the injuries. Or how Botterill is somehow going to make UFA's sign in the least desired city in the country on some sort of discount? Instead he traded 3/4th round picks for those veterans instead, and they're mostly all underperforming.