GDT: Game 9: Sharks @ Vegas 7pm NBCSCA

[DG93]

Holy shit is there a lot of whining going on in this thread...this team was meant to be awful, and it is. This is the painful part of the rebuild where the team has bottomed out. As more talent comes in every year, they will get better. Right now, it's all about the young guys getting some experience and developing their game, which is why Will Smith is here and why it's dumb to send him anywhere else. Celebrini coming back will give us another reason to watch even though the team will still be...wait for it, terrible!

Regarding this team, even when healthy, everyone is playing a line/pair above where they should be. Eklund-Celebrini-Toffoli, Granlund-Smith-Zetterlund, Goodrow-Wennberg-Sturm is a solid bottom-9, but they have 0 top line forwards. Walman-Ceci and Ferraro-Thompson is fine as a bottom-4, but they have zero top pairing defensemen. Eventually, Celebrini and hopefully other top draft picks (+ trades/FA signings) will fill those roles, but for now, that is why the team is very bad. And still, their underlying stats are not bottom-3 in the cap era bad like last year when they were rolling out a bunch of guys who aren't even NHL level players like Addison, Burroughs, Okhotiuk, Zadina, Barabanov, Hoffman, Carpenter, and Labanc.

We gotta stay patient...this is the way.

 

[coooldude]

It would be a massive improvement over Warso's lines.

No, it absolutely would not. It's just a line blender. That's not magic. Our team is just overmatched and each player is playing 1-3 lines above where they should, and no amount of mixing and matching is going to change that this season.

I wrote out a whole analysis of your lines and alternate lines but at the end of the day, we don't have enough 1st line talent, 2nd line talent to fill out two scoring lines, especially without our 1C, who is still an unproven 18 year old (lisan al gaib). And we only have just enough bottom 6 talent to have a solid game IF everyone shows up and plays well. That won't change no matter what magic chemistry anyone tries to find. Not to mention the D, which again, is an even worse situation and the real problem.

 

[weastern bias]

It would be a massive improvement over Warso's lines.

It would make zero difference, you still have no top line play drivers and every line has players playing over their depth, it's shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic

 

[Zarzh]

No, it absolutely would not. It's just a line blender. That's not magic. Our team is just overmatched and each player is playing 1-3 lines above where they should, and no amount of mixing and matching is going to change that this season.

I wrote out a whole analysis of your lines and alternate lines but at the end of the day, we don't have enough 1st line talent, 2nd line talent to fill out two scoring lines, especially without our 1C, who is still an unproven 18 year old (lisan al gaib). And we only have just enough bottom 6 talent to have a solid game IF everyone shows up and plays well. That won't change no matter what magic chemistry anyone tries to find. Not to mention the D, which again, is an even worse situation and the real problem.

That's not a line blender, what Warso is doing is a line blender. All I did was stick two players who can handle the puck and create some space with a guy who can forecheck hard and get to the net to take advantage of the space, that's pretty simple and it's the only real option.

What was Gushchin-Granlund-Toffoli even trying to do? Or Kostin-Smith-Zetterlund? Those are absolutely line blender lines.

 

[weastern bias]

That's not a line blender, what Warso is doing is a line blender. All I did was stick two players who can handle the puck and create some space with a guy who can forecheck hard and get to the net to take advantage of the space, that's pretty simple and it's the only real option.

What was Gushchin-Granlund-Toffoli even trying to do? Or Kostin-Smith-Zetterlund? Those are absolutely line blender lines.

It's a line blender, you're just rearranging the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th liners this team has to offer and trying to create a useful top-9

The problem with this team is not fit, it is a lack of talent

 

[exchequer]

Mike Grier has maximized our futures in the fallout but make no mistake the present was ALWAYS going to look like this in the mid 2020s as a result of Wilson's decisions, we literally had no avenues to avoid this

Except for the 3rd rounder for Thrun isn't looking genius right now.

 

[Star Platinum]

Except for the 3rd rounder for Thrun isn't looking genius right now.

Is it possible he was rushed to the NHL too quickly coming straight from the NCAA? We're not exactly talking about a guy who was an elite prospect.

 

[weastern bias]

Except for the 3rd rounder for Thrun isn't looking genius right now.

Spending a mid round pick on an NCAA prospect who it wiling to sign with you is a very reasonable gamble, it hasn't paid off with Thrun but the trade still made plenty of sense