I feel like there are a lot of parallels between Eller, Stephenson, and McMichael in terms of how the center hierarchy influences the success of a player.
You summarized all this very well, and there are certainly parallels one can draw between the various center logjams each of those players experienced. However, in Washington, the issue all over the lineup has been an inexplicable refusal to embrace natural turnover.
Even in cases where it's as natural as it gets -- a hole appears in the lineup at the same time a prospect at that position is ready to step up -- they've very often brought in a vet to prevent that from happening. Pay more to a guy with no future with the organization rather than paying way less to develop a guy that might stick and provide years of cost savings and years beyond that if you want to keep him.
It's a risk for sure, but the possible upside is huge and it's correctable if it doesn't work out.
Then there's the forward-thinking examples. Eller definitely had value heading into the 19-20 season. He was still performing at his career averages, figured to have productive years ahead of him, and was signed for 4 more years at a good number. But he wasn't a gamebreaker for us. The things he was best at were things Stephenson also had knacks for, only Stephenson was 5 years younger, cost-controlled, faster, better on the forecheck, and certainly had more offensive awareness.
Despite the revisionist history here, the bottom line with Stephenson is that Reirden buried him on the fourth and had a ridiculous tendency to rotate personnel there so no one could gel. Everyone on that line suffered during his stint as HC. Stephenson was every bit as good as Eller and then some, at a time when we could have traded Eller for significant return. Or just futures, cuz we damn sure needed the money at the time.
And again, this isn't because Stephenson was so great. He was better than we like to remember, and Eller was far more unremarkable than we like to admit. This is the kind of no-brainer foresight good GMs should have. Eller was never bad for us, but we always could have gotten more from his position and never should have settled for the lackluster talent we had on the 3rd during that stretch.
Now it's worse because Eller is 3 years older and the wings around him are a lot better than they used to be. We have wings on our 3rd line that can really score, centered by a guy who can't. He's ill-equipped to help them leverage what we need most from them.
And I don't really give a shit if McMichael is the answer. My point all along has been that we need to get SOMEONE into that spot; that we can't just keep settling for a sputtering 3rd line. If McMichael can't hack it, find someone who can. Waiting for Eller's expiration date is inexplicable.
"But we might get 6% worse at killing penalties!"
Yep, and we also might save 2.75m at the position with more offensive production and find out that someone else can step up and PK admirably the way someone always seems to every season.
"But we need the depth at center!"
Give me a percentage of how much worse you think all of our other center options are than Eller right now. I mean seriously, Lars Eller is not the difference between winning and losing. It is not difficult to replace what he brings to the table. He's just not that impactful anymore. I like the guy and he certainly doesn't suck, but it's not that hard to get better at his spot.
And you can sing basically the same song about other young players we quit on to embrace guys with higher pricetags and no future.
I've generally liked GMBM from the beginning. I think he's done far more good than bad, and I haven't supported canning him because there are way shittier managers out there, what he's proven to be bad at can be fixed, and I don't want to cut our nose off to spite our face. But this is definitely one of those "proven to be bad at" things.
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