I don't understand how anyone can rationalize the Nucks July 1 as good in anyway.
Ok? Passable? Understandable given circumstances? Sure. But not good.
They clearly had their money allocated for Guentzel. But that went out the window when Tbay traded for his rights.
I'm fine with DeBrusk. I don't like the term but I get that they to do it to keep the AAV as low as possible. But I would have expected more upfront if they were allocating say $9.5M for Guentzel and turn that into DeBrusk ($5.5M) and Arvidsson ($4M). Team needs actual goal scorers. This was evident in the playoffs. DeBrusk is more of a "puts in a shift and goes to the right areas" rather than a pure scorer.
So from that perspective, they still need another goal scoring winger in the Top 6.
On defense, they have gone backwards. No way you can have an older Myers in your Top 4 no matter how he played last year. They need another Top 4 dman and preferably RHD.
I assume they had interest in Tanev, but much like the TDL, the price did not make sense. So they pivoted and went for depth instead.
But the backend is not good. People can state the Oilers backend sucks but they have the horses upfront to compensate for it. Nucks don't, especially if Demko continues to be plagued by injuries.
People state we can make trades. What are we trading exactly to acquire what this team needs? Willander and Lekk aren't going anywhere. Can't see them trading their 2025 1st right now either. So you have Hoglander, Pod and maybe Garland. Hoglander's contract makes him more valuable to the Nucks than other teams, Pod won't have much value at all and removing Garland creates a further hole upfront.
So I just don't see it.
And then the comments of "we will just pick up a player at the TDL"? Jesus. That's literally 8-9 months away. You cannot expect this team to play the way they did to start last season. What if they play the way they did in the 2nd half? You're screwed.
So as much as it was fine to do what they did to focus on depth after the Guentzel option disappeared, this team still needs more quality. Right now they have focused on quantity over quality and that will only get you so far.
Team is still a playoff team but they aren't close to contenders atm.
I think it’s just the disparity between winning UFA signings and building a winning team. Relative to what other teams have done, the team has probably broken even or had wins on every UFA signing/re-signing they’ve done. There are three or four UFA contracts I would have preferred to what the team did yesterday, and an order of magnitude more that I would not.
But to move to the next level this team needs to find millions more in surplus value. A roster full of fair value UFA deals would be a bad one, and even one where you win every UFA deal by small amounts isn’t a great one.
The team has lost ~$10 million in surplus value just from their re-signings compared to last season. They probably needed another $5-10 million to become a contender.
Some of that will come from the contracts they already have becoming more efficient under a higher cap limit. They probably recouped a few more million yesterday through efficient signings. But they’ve now raised the floor about as much as they can, it’s hard to see the upside with the current group to go much beyond that and hard to see where they will find a clear path to an upgrade.
Sherwood and Desharnais seem like interesting candidates to move up the lineup, but it seem unlikely they will become top level contributors. At this point the team’s best bet is likely to bring in as many projects as they can and hope one hits, like Florida has done so successfully of late.
