So does Colin White & two of the Stall brothers. Sometimes you get lucky where you end up on the right team at the right time.
Staal plays 10, White plays 7. Vastly different roles. Duclair is a threat at ES and teams have to respect his speed and skill.
Spending $4m on a player that was PROVEN to only be worth $1.7m on the open market is the absolute peak of hfsens armchair GMing.
My dog could actually explain you a lot of things. Because everybody and their dog know that 1.7 was very contextual. I would have still GLADLY overpaid Duclair at 4.0 AAV for 4 years over some of the crap your idol did.
We're literally trying to tank. Waiving Balcers to play old vets served no purpose whatsoever when we are still rebuilding. Besides, we wouldn't necessarily have signed him to the same deal the Sharks did. Even their buying out of Balcers was questionable at the time since he had 23 points in 61 games and was the Shark's 6th highest scoring forward.
And the same season Dorion decides to waive Balcers, he also decides to acquire and sign Murray to a $6million aav, paying a 2nd for Stepan, and acquire Gudbranson. Dorion can't evaluate much at the pro level.
Sharks buying out Balcers was pretty contextual asthey just named a new GM (Grier) who wanted to become harder to play against. Balcers metrics were excellent and all Sharks fans liked him, particularly at his cheap AAV. A cheap fast 2-way player who can contribute offensively is valuable vs the dead corpses we iced all 2020-21 season
But the point is not even about Balcers, it's more about
NOT HAVING half the vets we iced in 2020-21. This was an absolutely
HORRIFYING off-season. It made Milbury look like the best GM of all time. We could use the excuse "
but we were taking"... lol we reached for Tyler freaking Boucher at 10th OA. Dorion clearly was not trying to tank. He actually thought with his vets moves that we could actually be decent. Why throw 6.25 AAV at a goalie if you're trying to tank?
Having these really bad vets at hockey actually HURT the rebuild. It didn't show anything positive to the young players, it didn't insulate them at all, it actually threw them to the wolves and some are still affected by that (Chabot for example). I would much rather have a young guys hustling like Balcers than a guy who clearly DID NOT want to be here (Paquette). Everyone in Quebec knows that. Same for Stepan apparently lol
Cedric Paquette had a role in Tampa because he had "fire in his belly". Without it, he's not a NHL caliber player. Thinking he would come to Ottawa with it is a GM rookie mistake, except that Dorion has been our GM for a while now...