CAR DAL Rantanen to DAL Stankoven 1sts to CAR

  • We sincerely apologize for the extended downtime. Our hosting provider, XenForo Cloud, encountered a major issue with their backup system, which unfortunately resulted in the loss of some critical data from the past year.

    What This Means for You:

    • If you created an account after March 2024, it no longer exists. You will need to sign up again to access the forum.
    • If you registered before March 2024 but changed your email, username, or password in the past year, those changes were lost. You’ll need to update your account details manually once you're logged in.
    • Threads and posts created within the last year have been restored.
    • Our 2025 light and dark themes were lost, so we are rebuilding them. Light theme is currently available, but work in progress

    Our team is working with Xenforo Cloud to recover data using backups, sitemaps, and other available resources. We know this is frustrating, and we deeply regret the impact on our community. We are taking steps with Xenforo Cloud to ensure this never happens again. This is work in progress. Thank you for your patience and support as we work through this.

    In the meantime, feel free to join our Discord Server
I seem to be the only one but I'm completely fine with not keeping Guentzel. His contract is fine and he'd be a fine player to have but I don't think he moves the needle so much that we should be bummed losing him. We can spend that cap elsewhere and be just as well off, if not better. Of course depends on moves we make from here on out but I do still trust this front office to spend that cap space wisely and continue to draft/develop well. They've earned the trust with the sustained success and perennial contender status we've had since '18-19. Still not a fan of how we handled Necas ultimately but that's a small blip and not all moves are going to work out no matter how great a team's front office is.
I think the thing with Jake is he’s just as good as Rants for significantly less money. He’s that 50ft player that matched really well with Aho which opens up putting other skilled players on the second line.

Losing him wasn’t the end of the world but of the two big swings he was the better choice and I think he would’ve moved the needle a bit.
 
Terrible leadership from a guy who wants leadership money but apparently is content with being a follower on the ice. Absolutely not the kind of player we want, and the kind of player that will inevitably lead to locker room issues wherever he goes unless he is paired with an alpha dominant player like MacKinnon.
Since leaving Nathan Mackinnon's wing Rantanen is on pace for 17 goals and 43 points over 82 games.
 
I think the thing with Jake is he’s just as good as Rants for significantly less money. He’s that 50ft player that matched really well with Aho which opens up putting other skilled players on the second line.

Losing him wasn’t the end of the world but of the two big swings he was the better choice and I think he would’ve moved the needle a bit.
Agreed. Guentzel is guaranteed to fall off as that contract ages but $8M AAV turned out to be a great bargain compared to what Rantanen cost and what UFA forwards will cost this off-season.

I still think he was going to July 1 no matter what, but matching it earlier and seeing if he signs maybe gives them a chance to pivot elsewhere earlier.
 
We messed up the negotiations with JG… no doubt. He had the power and we tried to squeeze him like he was a lifer with us or a young RFA without arbitration.. we misjudged that we could squeeze some savings out of him. No doubt…

But he was not this god like savior that many on here seem to remember him being.. he is good, no doubt…. But he had a number of pointless games or a game with just scoring an empty netter and not racking up 5 points a night like it sometimes seems the feeling was from the vibes at times on here. And for how much he was raved about as a playoff guy he wasn’t a difference maker there for us… then again we didn’t exactly have a lot of difference makers so it wasn’t just a JG issue… the whole team had a hand in hand one..

in spite of the pains, if you throw out the awful attitude and especially disinterested play his last week here, Rants had a ton of subtle good plays for us and even with the falling down issue still could hold the puck pretty well. If he was actually motivated he would have been a beast in our system. I saw the things that Tully was originally raving about. If he had wanted to actually stay here I think it would have gone really well. Too bad he didn’t want to be here…

I still think we need to find a bit more size that can bang and crash and help Aho line… a possession monster that can dig out pucks to let Aho and Jarvis find soft spots …. had hoped it would be svech but never know which svech will show up and no matter how many times we try it, they just don’t seem to mesh..
 
i still think about brett pesce's foot breaking and being stuck playing tony deangelo for a whole series
Agree we really didn’t have an answer to adjust when Pesce went down. We stayed pat on adding the big defensive dman to cover for losing a Pesce at the deadline. Philly got Johnson for almost nothing and we should have done that deal.. someone like him in that situation….. can’t help but thinking what if….
 
Agree we really didn’t have an answer to adjust when Pesce went down. We stayed pat on adding the big defensive dman to cover for losing a Pesce at the deadline. Philly got Johnson for almost nothing and we should have done that deal.. someone like him in that situation….. can’t help but thinking what if….

No offense, but it's easy to make that call in hindsight. If the Borg had picked up Johnson at the TD, and instead of Pesce getting hurt it was Aho, it would have been post-hoc-apparent that they should have picked up an insurance center instead of an insurance defensive D. Or if a pre-this-year's- decline-Burns had gotten hurt instead of Pesce, it would have been apparent that we should have picked up an offensive D that could run the PP. (especially since we wouldn't have known that the PP in the playoffs would stink even with Burns running it and would assume that his absence contributed to the fall off from the regular season).

It would be great if the Borg could cover all contingencies, but there's a practical limit as to what's possible. One of my former bosses told us that if we brought him problems we should also bring him possible solutions, so in that spirit here's my suggestion: the Borg should hire Madame Cleo in order to pick the right contingencies to cover. And to some of you haters out there, yes, I know she's dead, but given her talents there's no reason she can't cross the veil and help out the Canes!
 
No offense, but it's easy to make that call in hindsight. If the Borg had picked up Johnson at the TD, and instead of Pesce getting hurt it was Aho, it would have been post-hoc-apparent that they should have picked up an insurance center instead of an insurance defensive D. Or if a pre-this-year's- decline-Burns had gotten hurt instead of Pesce, it would have been apparent that we should have picked up an offensive D that could run the PP. (especially since we wouldn't have known that the PP in the playoffs would stink even with Burns running it and would assume that his absence contributed to the fall off from the regular season).

It would be great if the Borg could cover all contingencies, but there's a practical limit as to what's possible. One of my former bosses told us that if we brought him problems we should also bring him possible solutions, so in that spirit here's my suggestion: the Borg should hire Madame Cleo in order to pick the right contingencies to cover. And to some of you haters out there, yes, I know she's dead, but given her talents there's no reason she can't cross the veil and help out the Canes!
If we had lost a major piece of our team, there was no way we easily could have covered that up and it’s a different hindsight conversation…. We had some forwards to try to cover for losses of a forward. Losing Slavin is awfully hard to replace more so than Pesce… losing Aho is really tough as we didn’t have an extra $8M at the trade deadline to add another blockbuster over and above Guentzel….

But we aren’t talking about adding a high end player with no cap space to do it. We had cap space to add an extra insurance defensive dman and we didn’t…

Post deadline we still had enough cap space to fit him. We also already had Tony D on the roster.. he was the 7th dman all season… but Tony D is not your defensive dman who helps cover the hard defensive minutes if needed in the playoffs…

If we lose an offensive dman to injury, the idea would be that Tony D covers for that. Whether we believe he could have adequately covered for a Burns or Skjei or really win a cup with him playing every playoff game is an entirely different question… but you believe that he can at least be the offensive d guy due to his experience with the team to date and by having him on the roster all season..

We did not have a defensive dman on the roster to cover Pesce or even to cover Chatfield given how our d pairs were setup for the whole season. We took a risk because we got comfy seeing our d corp play with so few injuries all season..

We didn’t have a defensive dman in the minors that we felt comfortable throwing in there given where we were with our minors situation last season. When posting about it at the time, the thought was Smith was supposed to be that guy… but he isn’t really a defensive dman. And then wasn’t he hurt the rest of the year anyways?

No we can’t cover all possibilities.. but we had a pretty obvious item to look at with the deadline. Getting a decent affordable insurance policy when we had the cap to cover it seemed like a miss to me…. And I am pretty sure I said it at the deadline… it wasn’t a hindsight thing…

Hmm.. yup I did..

 
Last edited:
If we had lost a major piece of our team, there was no way we easily could have covered that up and it’s a different hindsight conversation…. We had some forwards to try to cover for losses of a forward. Losing Slavin is awfully hard to replace more so than Pesce… losing Aho is really tough as we didn’t have an extra $8M at the trade deadline to add another blockbuster over and above Guentzel….

But we aren’t talking about adding a high end player with no cap space to do it. We had cap space to add an extra insurance defensive dman and we didn’t…

Post deadline we still had enough cap space to fit him. We also already had Tony D on the roster.. he was the 7th dman all season… but Tony D is not your defensive dman who helps cover the hard defensive minutes if needed in the playoffs…

If we lose an offensive dman to injury, the idea would be that Tony D covers for that. Whether we believe he could have adequately covered for a Burns or Skjei or really win a cup with him playing every playoff game is an entirely different question… but you believe that he can at least be the offensive d guy due to his experience with the team to date and by having him on the roster all season..

We did not have a defensive dman on the roster to cover Pesce or even to cover Chatfield given how our d pairs were setup for the whole season. We took a risk because we got comfy seeing our d corp play with so few injuries all season..

We didn’t have a defensive dman in the minors that we felt comfortable throwing in there given where we were with our minors situation last season. When posting about it at the time, the thought was Smith was supposed to be that guy… but he isn’t really a defensive dman. And then wasn’t he hurt the rest of the year anyways?

No we can’t cover all possibilities.. but we had a pretty obvious item to look at with the deadline. Getting a decent affordable insurance policy when we had the cap to cover it seemed like a miss to me…. And I am pretty sure I said it at the deadline… it wasn’t a hindsight thing…

Hmm.. yup I did..


Sure enough, mea culpa and a tip of the cap.

That does raise an interesting question, though; how would you break down the blame for the Rags series loss between our D vs. Andersen's play in goal vs. our impotent PP?
 
Last edited:

Ad

Ad