Went for 3.6 to 4 aav after missing an entire year to injury. For his play this season, no matter how good or bad he plays, as long as he gets 10 games in, he will be getting paid 4 million dollars for his services. The highest of his career.
So we should injure him because Kenny painted himself in a corner and couldn't pay him market value? Nah. Also I think that he wins or at least draws a fight against Desharnais. And if Kane gets hurt then we may sewer our season.
It could be for the best. First off, we can always get players at the deadline, which might be better if we are adding cheap players on retention who are red hot, vs full priced players who might slump if we had kept them.
I doubt that Holloway will be as good defensively as Bjugstad, but he could equal or surpass him offensively. For all we know he could be our Skinner this year and displace the much pricier veteran in Brown. I'd love to see Lavoie catch on and pot 20ish goals.
They should just make you GM. You are so much smarter than NHL scouts and GMs.
I keep seeing this and I wanted to mention two things that I think that goes overlooked with the top 6 vs bottom 6 argument.
I don't see Foegele-McLeod-Ryan as a 3rd line for the entire season. All 3 players are a small slump from being relegated to the 4th line.
Meh lots of people could see the limitations of the player, the constant flubbing of opportunities and the growing injury risk and concussion history. Wasn't hard to spot that this would be a declining asset.
Could be, not would be. He also produced in line with what his contract ended up being. It's so much easier to GM when you can do it from a year in the future.
I find myself once again not entirely disagreeing with you.
Except anybody knows several people were questioning value at the time.
When you lose a player with balls like Kostin, and again picture that he was 23 yrs old fighting league toughs and wanting and winning those fights. The guy was ballsout all over the ice. You get that kind of energy player seldom. When he lands in your lap you better keep him. Kostin is that rare quantity of player that can score, run people through the boards, fight and be scary to play against. Kostin disrupts a lot more opponent players than given credit for. When you play against a player with pace and malevolence like that you have to keep your head up and you sometimes lose pucks that way or even give them up which I've seen.
Several people think our best defenseman is our worst defenseman too, so I don't take what "several people" think into consideration often. The reality is that players are paid for production. Yamamoto produced at a rate consistent with the contract he received. In hindsight, should we have tried to trade him a year ago? Yep. Should Holland have squeezed him into a 1 year deal instead of a 2? Yep. Did we know that at the time? Nope. Was there any way to know (not guess, but know) that he was going to hit the wall with injuries this year? No. And most importantly, if we didn't have to pay someone to get rid of Yamamoto, would we still have Klim Kostin? Based on the contract he signed, that's also a "no" as we couldn't afford to keep him at that rate.
Kostin was better than any of those players and you saw him as no loss. You can't wait to see Lavoie instead of Kostin. JFC..
They scored a combined two goals in twelve games mate. Is this how far gone some of you are? That a third line scoring two goals in an entire playoff run is good? One of the best we had I guess means very little, considering we only have two lines and one has McDavid on it, the other has Draisaitl. What a strange thing to say. One of our best lines. Means essentially nothing. They were horrible even if you did see them provide cycling in the offensive zone a handful of times throughout the series -- they did nothing of note.
If we sacrifice depth for an all in top 6 it is possible. Adding Brown was hood. Losing Kostin and Bjugstad IMO offsets that upgrade.
An astute GM doesn't rote pay players on selective numbers. Thats what arbitration does. Informed management is supposed to spot more than that.
Even as a fan of Ryan and McLeod its laughable to suggest they were among our better player or solid 3rd line. Its depth like that which tempts a coach to play topsix much more minutes.
Its odd that this point needs to be made as its clear as day. oh but we added the Drake, lol.
Every championship team you care to look at hasn't had this kind of view. They've had deep lineups and good players in those spots. They don't have two lines of bondo filler. I mean I could see fans of this team thinking this is the formula because its what goes on here. To get next level it seems you need good players in all spots and not just looking off the bottomsix and thinking its easy to improve.
I've said this before but I firmly believe the extra year was necessary to get Yamamoto to sign for $3.1M because in arbitration he could have gotten closer to $4M coming off a 20 goal season. People don't believe this but arbitration is pretty much entirely about comparative numbers. The arbitrator does not watch hokey nor does he/she care that those points were with McDavid. Had he received say $3.9M the Oilers would have been stuck. It would have pretty much meant moving out Foegele just to be able to field a 20-1 man roster since they were so tight to the cap.
Familiarity seems like the death of expectations. lol. What kind of circus have Oilers fans had to partake in to think that Foegele, Ryan, McLeod is a solid NHL line.
You hit the nail on the head with the bolded. The problem was Yamamoto filed for arbitration knowing full well that his chances of getting more than the $3.1M he signed for were excellent. As I said in a previous post arbitration is mostly about objective numbers. That is why team fear it. Players can file when they have seasons like Yamamoto did and the fact that his points came playing with McDrai doesn't really matter. He is a 20 goal scorer coming of his second contract and such players get paid. So the $3.1M was already a squeeze. Once he qualified Yamamoto Holland's cards were all on the table. The only card he might have held is to tell the player that if he signs at $XX he is effectively pricing himself off the team in the future. This is also the only card he can play vs McLeod.
So you just decline and let the player walk rather than pay 2yrs for a player on what was an untradeable contract that in the end we got nothing for, and that we even lost a valid player due to, because Kostin had to be added to the contract for Detroit to even take on the contract.
Here are the stats for that line in the playoffs.
