The improvement that matters is among bubble teams in the East, who we are competing with for a playoff spot. Can you tell me who in the East got significantly worse to the point that we’ll be able to beat out for a spot?
TLDR: I said a lot of stuff and rambled with my inner thoughts. Enjoy or not
having ullmark does not solve their defensive issues. Jensen is great and all but chychrun was probably better than him.
They are going to be slower with perron. ullmark cannot play 60 games. I also believe ullmark was as good as he was because he had boston bruins defensive hockey in front of him. Fleury was a great goalie for vegas because they jelled very well with the play styles, same goes for ullmark. He is going to have a completely different lineup in front of him that is very subpar from what he has been used too (remember when he was on buffalo?)
swayman is a great goalie and that will help boston. Boston is still probably going to be good but we played them very well last season and I believe two of our wins were with swayman in net.
montreal is bad
philly is going to take a big step back
columbus will look dangerous the first quarter of the season then fade
buffalo got a lot worse imo but we'll see
I honestly don't think washington got better or worse. Roy helps, but dubois is not going to have a resurrection, 2 other teams thought he would have, never happened.
Curious what TBL look like. I think they could be offensive juggernauts but terrible defensively. Sergachev move was...interesting.
carolina is going to play their system and frustrate everyone per usual.
nyi didn't really improve at all unless im missing something.
The big improvements seem to be the western conference (for a change...interesting).
If we can get a good trade going for trouba like i suggest above, infuse danielson who is going to be extremely good for us, full season of edvinsson on defense (actual defensive puck-mover) and gustaffson who can play defense better than the loss of ghost. I think we are in a position to not regress as terrible as people on here believe. If berggren is on the team, I think he replaces perron's point output and that is perfectly fine (if played correctly, he will do much better, or if we trade him for necas like i suggested than that is a definite improvement over perron).
The guys last year had that taste of one more point and they would have made it. That taste is disgusting and they won't let it happen again. They either sneak in or are out of the race by march.
We care about San Jose picking up Holl off waivers after he's traded to NYR... why?
More so that we add him to the trade for nyr to have another defenseman. Let them know that if they don't like his play, waive him and san jose will pick him up. One man's trash is another's treasure, so maybe they wouldn't mind having a free look at holl to see if he could fit or not with the reassurance from SJS that they will take him if he is waived by X date.
It's obviously an over think and we could just waive him now, but what is the fun in that?