Speculation: 2023-24-25 Sharks Roster Discussion

[Hodge]

No, he didn't. It took Celebrini's injury for Gushchin to get 4th line minutes, when it became obvious that he wasn't an instant superstar he was sent down.

Trotz is an idiot who sells low at every point he can. As a worst case scenario where they have a few uneventful years and leave for Europe, they're worth more because you aren't trading for Dellandrea, in the best case scenario they become something or you manage to fleece someone. In this scenario we're showcasing a bunch of players who might be hard to trade for future considerations.

Lol he didn't get sent down because he "wasn't an instant superstar" he got sent down because he did absolutely nothing to demonstrate that he's a NHL player even when given an opportunity on the second line with Wennberg and Zetterlund. This is a 23 year old soft one-dimensional smurf of a forward who has 14 points in 23 AHL games this season. It's over for him.

Fans constantly overrate and overvalue players like Gushchin, Bordeleau and Tomasino for that matter but NHL organizations don't. Trotz may or may not be an idiot but the reason Tomasino returned so little is because no serious team with playoff aspirations is going to deploy a guy like that in their bottom six and he's not talented enough to play in the top six. Gushchin and Bordeleau have even less offensive talent than him and are even more ill-suited to a bottom six role.

Very few teams run three scoring lines these days and when they do it's because they're so loaded with talent that they have surplus top six forwards who get pushed down to the third line (i.e. Tarasenko on the Panthers last year, Karlsson and Smith on Vegas the year before, Burakovsky on the Avs, Kessel on the Penguins teams that won, etc.). Kunin and Sturm have far more trade value than Bordeleau and Gushchin regardless of how many NHL minutes you undeservingly "showcase" them in because the former can actually play a role in a contender's bottom six.

 

[TheBeard]

Very few teams run three scoring lines these days

We’re barely running three scoring players.

 

[Zarzh]

Lol he didn't get sent down because he "wasn't an instant superstar" he got sent down because he did absolutely nothing to demonstrate that he's a NHL player even when given an opportunity on the second line with Wennberg and Zetterlund. This is a 23 year old soft one-dimensional smurf of a forward who has 14 points in 23 AHL games this season. It's over for him.

Fans constantly overrate and overvalue players like Gushchin, Bordeleau and Tomasino for that matter but NHL organizations don't. Trotz may or may not be an idiot but the reason Tomasino returned so little is because no serious team with playoff aspirations is going to deploy a guy like that in their bottom six and he's not talented enough to play in the top six. Gushchin and Bordeleau have even less offensive talent than him and are even more ill-suited to a bottom six role.

Very few teams run three scoring lines these days and when they do it's because they're so loaded with talent that they have surplus top six forwards who get pushed down to the third line (i.e. Tarasenko on the Panthers last year, Karlsson and Smith on Vegas the year before, Burakovsky on the Avs, Kessel on the Penguins teams that won, etc.). Kunin and Sturm have far more trade value than Bordeleau and Gushchin regardless of how many NHL minutes you undeservingly "showcase" them in because the former can actually play a role in a contender's bottom six.

Any competent team runs 3 scoring lines. So you want to adopt Buffalo's asset management and Toronto's roster construction?

 

[Hodge]

Any competent team runs 3 scoring lines. So you want to adopt Buffalo's asset management and Toronto's roster construction?

You're missing the point. It's good to run 3 scoring lines if, for example, we added two more legitimate top six forwards to the current roster to organically push Zetterlund and Toffoli down to the 3rd line. It's not good to create a fraudulent "3rd scoring line" by promoting small, soft, defensively inept one-dimensional AHL scorers to a league they don't belong in. You've simply built another useless 3rd line that's useless in a slightly different way than our current 3rd line.

Also it's just not true that any competent team runs 3 scoring lines. Edmonton's 3rd line en route to SCF Game 7 was Foegele-McLeod-Perry. Carolina has had tons of regular season success building a 3rd line around Martinook and Jordan Staal for years. Tampa's "3rd line" (really more of a 2nd line by ice time) during their back-to-back Cups was Coleman-Gourde-Goodrow. Go look up the depth charts for some of the top teams in the league this year like Washington and Winnipeg and tell me with a straight face that they have 3 scoring lines.

 

[Zarzh]

You're missing the point. It's good to run 3 scoring lines if, for example, we added two more legitimate top six forwards to the current roster to organically push Zetterlund and Toffoli down to the 3rd line. It's not good to create a fraudulent "3rd scoring line" by promoting small, soft, defensively inept one-dimensional AHL scorers to a league they don't belong in. You've simply built another useless 3rd line that's useless in a slightly different way than our current 3rd line.

Also it's just not true that any competent team runs 3 scoring lines. Edmonton's 3rd line en route to SCF Game 7 was Foegele-McLeod-Perry. Carolina has had tons of regular season success building a 3rd line around Martinook and Jordan Staal for years. Tampa's "3rd line" (really more of a 2nd line by ice time) during their back-to-back Cups was Coleman-Gourde-Goodrow. Go look up the depth charts for some of the top teams in the league this year like Washington and Winnipeg and tell me with a straight face that they have 3 scoring lines.

Edmonton has McDavid. Carolina usually puts a talented 3rd player with Staal, and Tampa Bay had a 50 point center and a 45 point winger on their 3rd line. Winnipeg gets destroyed by any competent team every single season.

I've built a line that works in the way the team should eventually want to play instead of wasting talent to do something that won't work and giving up picks to do so.

 

[Jargon]

I think a good third line is a mix of guys that can score and shut down the other team. Honestly, I think a Kovalenko - Wennberg - Toffoli as a 3rd line could do damage in the playoffs (good defensively, can score, etc.).

 

[OrrNumber4]

Again, I think the focus on the importance of depth in the playoffs is misguided. Your top stars will lead the way...if you don't have that in place, all the depth in the world will not matter.

 

[Hodge]

Again, I think the focus on the importance of depth in the playoffs is misguided. Your top stars will lead the way...if you don't have that in place, all the depth in the world will not matter.

This is truer right now than it's ever been since maybe the 80s. We are (mercifully) no longer in a league where Stanley Cups are determined by Ruslan Fedotenko and Max Talbot. It's superstars like Reinhart, Eichel, Makar and Kucherov driving the bus. McDavid almost singlehandedly willed the Oilers to a championship. Kaprizov was having a NBA star level impact on Minnesota this season before he got injured.

 

[Pavelski2112]

This is truer right now than it's ever been since maybe the 80s. We are (mercifully) no longer in a league where Stanley Cups are determined by Ruslan Fedotenko and Max Talbot. It's superstars like Reinhart, Eichel, Makar and Kucherov driving the bus. McDavid almost singlehandedly willed the Oilers to a championship. Kaprizov was having a NBA star level impact on Minnesota this season before he got injured.

All of those teams had crazy depth though. Tampa had top pairing LHD on every pairing, plus an incredibly effective 3rd line. Florida arguably didn't have a true #1D but they had plenty of depth on defense to make up for it, not to mention guys like Lundell having more points than Reinhart did. Vegas has always been a team where their depth is their strength, and Eichel was just a piece that put them over the edge rather than being the guy who "drove the bus".

The Oilers are a perfect example of why you can't rely on just top players, because even with McDavid and Draisaitl having insane historic playoff runs, they still haven't been able to win it all because their defense is terrible and they don't have enough depth scoring. Hell, look at Quinn in Vancouver - he's playing some of the best hockey by a defenseman in the Cap era, but they're not able to put it together around that.