Around the NHL 2024-2025

[WeWentBlues]

The trend we keep seeing over and over again is this: we seem to dislike young defensemen, and we would rather play veterans. We never took Dunn off of the leash, even though he deserved it. We barely gave Walman a chance. We didn't give Schmaltz a legit shot until his D+7 year, and then promptly traded him for Andreas Borgman (who we also did nothing with). We sent Kessel down in a year that was supposed to be a "retool" instead of letting him take his lumps.

The problem is what we can call the Krug/Faulk problem. We spend all of this capital on getting older defensemen with polished games, and pay them a bunch of money on long-term contracts. When they (predictably) start to fall off a cliff, they still have several years left on their contracts. At the same time, we have young guys maturing and ready to start taking on roles, but they're blocked because you can't cut/healthy scratch a $5+ mil player. So we waste their prime years, and then by the time we're ready to cut bait, their value has fallen and we don't get great value out of them. And so now we don't have a backlog of competent dmen, so we have to go out and sign/trade for a veteran, and the cycle continues.

 

[Xerloris]

That’s a fair perspective, but if Army valued Mikkola enough, then we would have him. In the end, though, maybe getting out of St. Louis was best for him and is probably what he wanted anyway. Maybe Army knew Mikkola would not re-sign.

I mean he f***ing sucked here. He's good in Florida because it's an environment where his sill set shines and his flaws can be hidden. That's not what the Blues were during his tenure here.

The trend we keep seeing over and over again is this: we seem to dislike young defensemen, and we would rather play veterans. We never took Dunn off of the leash, even though he deserved it. We barely gave Walman a chance. We didn't give Schmaltz a legit shot until his D+7 year, and then promptly traded him for Andreas Borgman (who we also did nothing with). We sent Kessel down in a year that was supposed to be a "retool" instead of letting him take his lumps.

The problem is what we can call the Krug/Faulk problem. We spend all of this capital on getting older defensemen with polished games, and pay them a bunch of money on long-term contracts. When they (predictably) start to fall off a cliff, they still have several years left on their contracts. At the same time, we have young guys maturing and ready to start taking on roles, but they're blocked because you can't cut/healthy scratch a $5+ mil player. So we waste their prime years, and then by the time we're ready to cut bait, their value has fallen and we don't get great value out of them. And so now we don't have a backlog of competent dmen, so we have to go out and sign/trade for a veteran, and the cycle continues.

I mean if only we would have allowed Parayko to flourish as a young Dman, Or Edmundson or Broberg... Or Tucker ......

 

[MortiestOfMortys]

I mean if only we would have allowed Parayko to flourish as a young Dman, Or Edmundson or Broberg... Or Tucker ......

Parayko is a unicorn in a lot of ways.

We acquired Broberg, which doesn't really disprove my "we don't like our young dmen" theory.

Between Tucker and Edmundson, they share a few particular traits, don't they? "Truculence" is what Hitch used to call it. It doesn't change the fact it took Monty to step in and say "this guy can play" for Tucker. Before that, Bannister had him in Springfield (where he also sent Kessel).

Eddy was also out of here the first chance we got. He played top-4 minutes from his second season until he hoisted the Cup. And then we shipped him out for a veteran who, ultimately, led to us also later letting Pietrangelo walk. Because we preferred Faulk to both of them. No need to re-hash that whole thing again here, plenty of other threads to do that in.

We left Dunn exposed in the expansion draft over Krug because... we prefer veteran Dmen. Even if the young guys win a job, historically they've been on the hot seat. I'm hopeful that ship starts to balance out a bit with Monty, who sat Suter -- the most veteran dman you could possibly get -- to play Tucks.

 

[BadgersandBlues]

I disagree with the analysis that we didn't "like" young defenseman. Our top two D, and four of our top five D in terms of ice time in the Cup year were drafted and developed by the Blues, and Jay-Bo had been with the organization for seven years. which was over half his career at that point.

The fact of the matter is that once AP arrived and we clearly had a true #1 type guy, Armstrong was in win-now mode, not let players make mistakes and grow mode (Kinda where we were these last 2ish years). D take longer to develop, and frankly most of the guys that we moved on from haven't really done much. Cole turned into a decent top 4 guy, but nothing spectacular. Walman has had a bit of a career resurgence, but had a career high of 21 points prior to this season (And has put up a whopping 2 points in 11 games this playoffs).

Mikkola couldn't make a breakout pass to save his life when he was here. We gave him 140 NHL games to learn how to do it, and he didn't. I don't know how he learned to pass in Florida, but I'm happy for him that he did. Let's not bemoan the fact that we gave him up though, he wasn't able to execute on a regular basis and we didn't want to pay him UFA prices to find out if he could.

 

[Beninnola]

The trend we keep seeing over and over again is this: we seem to dislike young defensemen, and we would rather play veterans. We never took Dunn off of the leash, even though he deserved it. We barely gave Walman a chance. We didn't give Schmaltz a legit shot until his D+7 year, and then promptly traded him for Andreas Borgman (who we also did nothing with). We sent Kessel down in a year that was supposed to be a "retool" instead of letting him take his lumps.

The problem is what we can call the Krug/Faulk problem. We spend all of this capital on getting older defensemen with polished games, and pay them a bunch of money on long-term contracts. When they (predictably) start to fall off a cliff, they still have several years left on their contracts. At the same time, we have young guys maturing and ready to start taking on roles, but they're blocked because you can't cut/healthy scratch a $5+ mil player. So we waste their prime years, and then by the time we're ready to cut bait, their value has fallen and we don't get great value out of them. And so now we don't have a backlog of competent dmen, so we have to go out and sign/trade for a veteran, and the cycle continues.

I think a large part of this is that a defenseman picked, say 20th overall, had (I don’t have a current data table, lazy, was like this 5 yr ago) a less than 50% chance to play more than 100 games and even lower chance to play 300.

If it isn’t a lottery pick it most likely isn’t an nhler. A lot of our defensive picks have gone this way and that’s how it goes.

Dunn is unfortunate. Always been a fan of his attitude and would enjoy him on our team but expansion was going to take something and we exposed tarasenko. Maybe we messed up bad on this one but we were going to lose something and Seattle wasn’t looking to help anybody but themselves. The rest - I mean - they can either earn the spot or not. At the same time some of these fellows did or didn’t make it, Parayko had no issue. None of these fellows besides mikkola (and Dunn) are thriving elsewhere. Dunn isn’t exactly killing it. The circumstances of their specific challenge is theirs to overcome. I don’t feel we failed walman, schmaltz, etc. if the rangers had retained mikkola id feel worse about him. There is a lot of competition for floridas depth chart (many nhlers want the tax free markets = high demand). I don’t think many players end up there by happenstance. Due to the competition it’s likely you have to put some effort in guiding your ship there.

 

[ChicagoBlues]

Seguin ties!!!

i was just gonna post that the Stars are a little slow and then Seguin takes the puck and speeds away for a goal.

Otherwise, the Oilers are dominating most of the 1st period.

What the hell is Subban doing? Oh yeah. He's Subbaning.

Besides the Stars' defense being a little iffy at times, they are also a little slow. Oilers are skating circles around them.

Miro floats it in by a screen!!! 3-2 Oilers.

Harley is having a rough game.

Stars PP sux. And then they score again on the PP. 3-3
Their PP has finally woken up.

Wyatt with a great forecheck.

Oilers falling apart. Another Stars PP.

Scored again!! Duchene, I think. 3-4 Stars

 

[Spektre]

Just lose Edmonton

 

[TruBlueFan1970]

Loved seeing them collapse and lose game 1. They did look like the better team. They probably still win this in 5 or 6 games.

 

[Brian39]

It still makes no sense how Marner (and I think Matthews too) got such a high paying contract that took him right to UFA and he still got a NTC. If you let the player win on money and years, how did you still lose on the NTC? It finally bit them this year when they couldn't trade Marner for Rantanen because Marner wouldn't waive his NTC. Having Rantanen instead might have been enough to win this series.

Those contracts were (at least in part) the result of them blowing up their cap structure to land Tavares in UFA. Even though Tavares absolutely could have gotten more money elsewhere, the money he left on the table to go 'home' to Toronto still made him the 2nd highest paid player in the league. And they signed it while all of their franchise cornerstone young guys were still on their ELCs and hadn't signed extensions.

In year 1 of the Tavares era, he and Marner played on the same line. Marner scored 6 more points than Tavares and finished ahead of him in Selke voting as a 21 year old. And that was while Tavares set career-bests in goals and points. At the time Matthews signed his extension in February of this year, he was scoring goals at an identical pace to Tavares and was scoring points at a higher pace than Tavares. In both situations, the Leafs were negotiating with 21 year olds who were already showing to be better and more important players than the guy they just broke the bank for.

The player argument was that they had absolutely no incentive to sign long term deals to spend their primes making less than Tavares. Those two were overwhelmingly seen as the two most important players in the organization and had no interest playing 2nd financial fiddle to Tavares. And if the team wanted to discuss RFA vs UFA, they very credibly were able to respond by saying "fine, then I'm not interested in selling you a single UFA year since that is the way this organization wants to value its assets."

FWIW, the Leafs got 6 years of Marner (purchasing 2 UFA years) for an AAV just cheaper than Tavares. And the Leafs got 5 years of Matthews (purchasing 1 UFA year) for an AAV $600k more than Tavares. I'm not saying that the Leafs got great bargains here, but the alternative was to give them substantially more than Tavares on max term deals or 2 year bridges that set them up to get likely-unaffordable raises quickly.

The Tavares signing (and subsequent RFA negotiations) are a cautionary study in spending a boatload on a UFA in a position not of high need before locking up your franchise players. And then the COVID-caused flat cap came at the absolute worst possible time for the Leafs to magnify the problem. They locked up Matthews in February of 2019 and Marner in September of 2019 with the cap at $81.5M in year 1. The cap didn't rise at all for years 2 and 3. It went to $82.5M for year 4 and $83.5M for year 5. That is a $2M total increase through 5 years. Typical cap growth had been $10M+ over 5 year samples through the cap era.

I think that there were other issues with the Leafs construction and negotiations, but the Tavares signing set them up to lose negotiations with Marner/Matthews and then the flat cap brutally impacted their ability to navigate around those three contracts.

 

[Stealth JD]

What the hell is this shit? That's the biggest click-bait headline i've ever seen, and the article below says just the opposite. LOL

Jack Eichel to join the New York Rangers next season was just confirmed: Per Elliotte Friedman

NHL Insider Elliotte Friedman has just confirmed Jack Eichel's fate with the New York Rangers organization in the near future.

www.nyrangersinsider.com

 

[Majorityof1]

What the hell is this shit? That's the biggest click-bait headline i've ever seen, and the article below says just the opposite. LOL

Jack Eichel to join the New York Rangers next season was just confirmed: Per Elliotte Friedman

NHL Insider Elliotte Friedman has just confirmed Jack Eichel's fate with the New York Rangers organization in the near future.

www.nyrangersinsider.com

It got you to click. And now several more people clicked on it cause you posted it here. Click bait and rage bait sadly work.

 

[BadgersandBlues]

Those contracts were (at least in part) the result of them blowing up their cap structure to land Tavares in UFA. Even though Tavares absolutely could have gotten more money elsewhere, the money he left on the table to go 'home' to Toronto still made him the 2nd highest paid player in the league. And they signed it while all of their franchise cornerstone young guys were still on their ELCs and hadn't signed extensions.

In year 1 of the Tavares era, he and Marner played on the same line. Marner scored 6 more points than Tavares and finished ahead of him in Selke voting as a 21 year old. And that was while Tavares set career-bests in goals and points. At the time Matthews signed his extension in February of this year, he was scoring goals at an identical pace to Tavares and was scoring points at a higher pace than Tavares. In both situations, the Leafs were negotiating with 21 year olds who were already showing to be better and more important players than the guy they just broke the bank for.

The player argument was that they had absolutely no incentive to sign long term deals to spend their primes making less than Tavares. Those two were overwhelmingly seen as the two most important players in the organization and had no interest playing 2nd financial fiddle to Tavares. And if the team wanted to discuss RFA vs UFA, they very credibly were able to respond by saying "fine, then I'm not interested in selling you a single UFA year since that is the way this organization wants to value its assets."

FWIW, the Leafs got 6 years of Marner (purchasing 2 UFA years) for an AAV just cheaper than Tavares. And the Leafs got 5 years of Matthews (purchasing 1 UFA year) for an AAV $600k more than Tavares. I'm not saying that the Leafs got great bargains here, but the alternative was to give them substantially more than Tavares on max term deals or 2 year bridges that set them up to get likely-unaffordable raises quickly.

The Tavares signing (and subsequent RFA negotiations) are a cautionary study in spending a boatload on a UFA in a position not of high need before locking up your franchise players. And then the COVID-caused flat cap came at the absolute worst possible time for the Leafs to magnify the problem. They locked up Matthews in February of 2019 and Marner in September of 2019 with the cap at $81.5M in year 1. The cap didn't rise at all for years 2 and 3. It went to $82.5M for year 4 and $83.5M for year 5. That is a $2M total increase through 5 years. Typical cap growth had been $10M+ over 5 year samples through the cap era.

I think that there were other issues with the Leafs construction and negotiations, but the Tavares signing set them up to lose negotiations with Marner/Matthews and then the flat cap brutally impacted their ability to navigate around those three contracts.

Yep. The Tavares contract is the Original Sin of this era of futility for Toronto.

Image the Leafs had locked up all of Matthews, Marner, and Nylander long term for under 10M each, then signed AP when he became available two years later. I think that core has way more playoff success then the current model.

 

[Stealth JD]

It got you to click. And now several more people clicked on it cause you posted it here. Click bait and rage bait sadly work.

LOL…it popped up in Google news and I assumed Eichel had been traded, which would’ve been odd in itself.

 

[Ranksu]

 

[Hrkac Circus]

Anyone besides me thinks Canadian fans whine a lot about officiating? Winnipeg and Edmonton fans in particular seem to think every call or non-call that doesn’t go there way is a travesty. And I know every fan base has whiners. But this playoffs it seems ridiculous. And I know the theory Bettman hates Canadian teams so officiating is biased against them. But to me that theory has no legitimacy.

 

[Beninnola]

Anyone besides me thinks Canadian fans whine a lot about officiating? Winnipeg and Edmonton fans in particular seem to think every call or non-call that doesn’t go there way is a travesty. And I know every fan base has whiners. But this playoffs it seems ridiculous. And I know the theory Bettman hates Canadian teams so officiating is biased against them. But to me that theory has no legitimacy.

I don’t have facts but I’d guess for every 1 whiny Canadian there are 4 whiny Avs fans.

 

[Brian39]

Yep. The Tavares contract is the Original Sin of this era of futility for Toronto.

Image the Leafs had locked up all of Matthews, Marner, and Nylander long term for under 10M each, then signed AP when he became available two years later. I think that core has way more playoff success then the current model.

Imagine if they had beaten the Blues offer to trade for ROR instead of signing Tavares on 7/1/18. They have all the cash in the world to have paid the bonus that Buffalo was so worried about.

ROR cost $3.5M a year less against the cap than Tavares did from 2018/19 through 2022/23. Even if they don't save any additional money on the subsequent raises to the young guys, that savings alone is pretty substantial. Speaking of Petro, if the Blues didn't have ROR that year, we probably would have been worse and who knows if Army would have ultimately been more willing to blow up that group. It has been reported by a few sources that the Blues and Leafs got close on a deal centered around Pietrangelo and Nylander that year.

There is very a real alternate scenario where the Leafs could have entered the 2018/19 playoffs with ROR and Petro on their roster, better contracts for Matthews/Marner since they wouldn't have been able to use Tavares as an internal comp, and thus the cap flexibility to extend Petro for 2020/21 and beyond. We don't win our Cup, blow up the roster to rebuild around youth, and watch Petro lift 1 or more Cups in Toronto.

Luckily, Toronto "won" free agency by giving Tavares $11M after he wouldn't meet with our front office and we had to "settle" for signing Bozak as a UFA and then packaging a big futures haul for ROR so Toronto could watch Bozak lift the Cup for us. Funny how that works out.

 

[Memento]

Anyone besides me thinks Canadian fans whine a lot about officiating? Winnipeg and Edmonton fans in particular seem to think every call or non-call that doesn’t go there way is a travesty. And I know every fan base has whiners. But this playoffs it seems ridiculous. And I know the theory Bettman hates Canadian teams so officiating is biased against them. But to me that theory has no legitimacy.

In my experience on this site, Edmonton fans, with a few exceptions, are the most insufferable fans of all, and I don’t want them anywhere near a Stanley Cup again.

From the constant asking for Parakyo threads that devolve into their victimhood (oh, the mean Blues fans asked for McDavid in return, they’re so irrational!), to the disparaging comments about the city the Blues play in along with hot takes on why Holloway didn’t really want to follow the evil, greedy Broberg to St. Louis, all the way to their team lucking into McDavid and Draisaitl, and constantly bitching about officiating, they’ve constantly been insufferable.

I hope the Stars sweep their team so I can delight in the meltdown. If I’m sounding harsh, I apologize. I just cannot stand city/country (any city/country; people have no choice where they’re born and where they grow up) bashers who do it on a personal level; those people have no souls.

 

[Beninnola]

Those contracts were (at least in part) the result of them blowing up their cap structure to land Tavares in UFA. Even though Tavares absolutely could have gotten more money elsewhere, the money he left on the table to go 'home' to Toronto still made him the 2nd highest paid player in the league. And they signed it while all of their franchise cornerstone young guys were still on their ELCs and hadn't signed extensions.

In year 1 of the Tavares era, he and Marner played on the same line. Marner scored 6 more points than Tavares and finished ahead of him in Selke voting as a 21 year old. And that was while Tavares set career-bests in goals and points. At the time Matthews signed his extension in February of this year, he was scoring goals at an identical pace to Tavares and was scoring points at a higher pace than Tavares. In both situations, the Leafs were negotiating with 21 year olds who were already showing to be better and more important players than the guy they just broke the bank for.

The player argument was that they had absolutely no incentive to sign long term deals to spend their primes making less than Tavares. Those two were overwhelmingly seen as the two most important players in the organization and had no interest playing 2nd financial fiddle to Tavares. And if the team wanted to discuss RFA vs UFA, they very credibly were able to respond by saying "fine, then I'm not interested in selling you a single UFA year since that is the way this organization wants to value its assets."

FWIW, the Leafs got 6 years of Marner (purchasing 2 UFA years) for an AAV just cheaper than Tavares. And the Leafs got 5 years of Matthews (purchasing 1 UFA year) for an AAV $600k more than Tavares. I'm not saying that the Leafs got great bargains here, but the alternative was to give them substantially more than Tavares on max term deals or 2 year bridges that set them up to get likely-unaffordable raises quickly.

The Tavares signing (and subsequent RFA negotiations) are a cautionary study in spending a boatload on a UFA in a position not of high need before locking up your franchise players. And then the COVID-caused flat cap came at the absolute worst possible time for the Leafs to magnify the problem. They locked up Matthews in February of 2019 and Marner in September of 2019 with the cap at $81.5M in year 1. The cap didn't rise at all for years 2 and 3. It went to $82.5M for year 4 and $83.5M for year 5. That is a $2M total increase through 5 years. Typical cap growth had been $10M+ over 5 year samples through the cap era.

I think that there were other issues with the Leafs construction and negotiations, but the Tavares signing set them up to lose negotiations with Marner/Matthews and then the flat cap brutally impacted their ability to navigate around those three contracts.

I dont want to necessarily defend Dubas but I always had issue with shanahans first front office job being team president.

I’m sure he put in the work?

He was never an agm, a gm or a scout and to my knowledge never built or managed intl teams. Just straight to president then overseeing one of the youngest gms in the game.

I’d presume he had his role because the board liked him and I presume he had close to final say on personnel decisions. I’d prefer a talent who did the job and succeeded into promotion versus a guy who just got the promotion without doing the prerequisite.

They should have let doobey doobey doo do his thing imo.

 

[Majorityof1]

Anyone besides me thinks Canadian fans whine a lot about officiating? Winnipeg and Edmonton fans in particular seem to think every call or non-call that doesn’t go there way is a travesty. And I know every fan base has whiners. But this playoffs it seems ridiculous. And I know the theory Bettman hates Canadian teams so officiating is biased against them. But to me that theory has no legitimacy.

I'd be willing to bet this forum, the Blues forum, had more whining about officiating per post than any other team during this playoffs. I have most the usual complainers on ignore and it was still every other post during the GDTs. We had a better track record posting the line up of refs and our record against them than we did posting the lineups of players.

Put down the stone. Our glass house will thank you.

 

[STL fan in MN]

So…Denmark just beat Canada in the QFs at Worlds.

The Canadians peppered the Danes with 40 shots but were only able to score once. Denmark pulled their goalie and Canada, including Binnington, allowed the 6 on 5 goal from Ehlers to tie it.

Then this happened…


Canada eliminated.

 

[SirPaste]

Not really Binny's fault but man sucks that happened to him again in such a short time

 

[STL fan in MN]

Not really Binny's fault but man sucks that happened to him again in such a short time

Yeah, neither goal was his fault and also not his fault his teammates couldn’t score more than once against the Danes but man, he’s probably going to have nightmares of Nikolaj Ehlers now.

 

[Xerloris]

Yeah, neither goal was his fault and also not his fault his teammates couldn’t score more than once against the Danes but man, he’s probably going to have nightmares of Nikolaj Ehlers now.

Funny you say it's not his fault when your original post certainly sounds like you're blaming him.

 

[ChicagoBlues]

So…Denmark just beat Canada in the QFs at Worlds.

The Canadians peppered the Danes with 40 shots but were only able to score once. Denmark pulled their goalie and Canada, including Binnington, allowed the 6 on 5 goal from Ehlers to tie it.

Then this happened…


Canada eliminated.

Freddie Andersen in goal?