Our 6th D is what we’re hoping to upgrade? I’d like to make a more meaningful move than that myself. I’d rather upgrade the top 4 and move TVR down.
McPhee sealed his own fate when he gave a quote along the lines of ”not everyone who started this journey will be here at the end”…..was after someone was traded away I think.
He was the glue.
I also think back to the Pronger trade rumours. It was Carlson + 1st + something else significant. I can’t remember.
Pronger trade rumors were one of the young D (Carlson/Alzner) + one of the young goalies (Varlamov/Neuvirth) + 2x 1sts. McPhee's response was rumored to be "I'm not doing your rebuild for you"
They were involved and they made him an offer. Once it went above George’s number he bowed it. Washington missed out on prime Big Z over $1.25M/year.
This was when the cap was 46m. So 7.5m for Chara was considered insane at the time. At the time most people considered Redden the guy who made the pairing tick, which is why Ottawa kept him over Chara. Chara also demanded the captaincy.
I would have paid other teams $ and washed the GM'S cars just to get rid of Brouwer. Dude was garbage and to make it worse there was some unconfirmed speculations that he was a locker room cancer. I was ecstatic when they got rid of him.
Anaheim picked Kyle Palmieri and Emerson Etem with the 2x 1sts they acquired from Philadelphia. If you sub in Washington's picks in those drafts it would be Marcus Johansson and Evgeni Kuznetsov. Playing with that kind of hindsight, I don't think I do the trade (we don't win in 2018 without Kuzy's Smythe-worthy performance). But obviously we can't really judge the trade using hindsight.
With hindsight, this is obviously one of the bigger misses for GMGM. A natural LD entering his prime without having to give up the type of assets they would have for Pronger (who was a 34 year old RD).
McPhee had his welcome way overstayed. 17yrs was too long, and cost this franchise more bites at the apple. That’s on Ted.
I agree that free agent class doesnt look appealing. I didnt look at the whole league but below are the starters for the 16 playoff teams in 07-08 in no order. So the caps had pretty much close to the worst if not the worst goaltending going in. Again my point was that GMGM didnt do the things to improve the team significantly at the beginning of Ovis career. The franchise goalie didnt arrive for 6,7,8 years later? Once it was clear that Ovi was one of if not the best player in the league goaltending should have been immediately addressed via trade for whatever. How much better can then the future be then having prime Ovi. I agree with you about a lot of the other stuff you said about Mcphee building a team to last 10-15 years but thats only because he was unwilling to give up any of his prospects or picks. As far as the Oshie trade goes, I also agree that type of player is not readily available. We will never know what other players could have been available that he was unwilling to give up the assets for. It all worked out in the end with the cup win but maybe it could have been 3-1 cups for caps over Pitt if the right moves were made.
I agree with you that missing on Chara was the biggest what-if of Ovechkin's early career, but there are 2 things I want to quibble about. First, though I did it many moons ago, when I worked out the cap hits of the Caps in those first couple of seasons post-lockout, the sell-off that McPhee did removed basically all the large contracts on the team, so Chara's deal wouldn't have done anything to put the team in cap hell. Second, and probably way more important is that this was essentially the first full free agency period of the cap era. If the Chara opportunity comes a year or two later, or you give GMGM perfect information on how the cap was going to increase, and I think he's much more aggressive in his offers. He was hesitant because the only cap info he had was the rise from 39 to 44 from 05-06 to 06-07.
no
