How to hold accountable these anchor contracts?

[Natey]

Hard to replace #1 goalie and #1 defenseman in same off season.

What?

 

[lamp9post]

I would like to see the cap penalties for buyouts reduced significantly. Yes, teams should suffer the consequences of signing bad contracts, but you can't forsee the future in terms of player value or account for unpredictable injuries. I think the current system is far too punishing for teams and more importantly, their fans.

 

[HuGo Sham]

What

price / weber ?

 

[Natey]

price / weber ?

Price, Markov, Radulov...

 

[BaseballCoach]

I would like to see the cap penalties for buyouts reduced significantly. Yes, teams should suffer the consequences of signing bad contracts, but you can't forsee the future in terms of player value or account for unpredictable injuries. I think the current system is far too punishing for teams and more importantly, their fans.

It would not be good to allow players to get more money than teams are hit with cap, so reducing the penalty would have to go along with reducing the buyout cost. The NHLPA is not likely to agree, even though less money for over the hill guys means more money for productive guys.

 

[dcyhabs]

We need to shed salary to be able to resign better players down the line , we finished 32nd and have been really bad recently how much are you going to miss any of those players? They were good soldiers but it was time to move on.

Imagine if Bergevin was still in charge I can't even imagine the moves he would be making to *improve the team* lmfao

The supporting cast is unbalanced and the last signings were really terrible, but the bulk of the team is fine if the habs get 3-4 top players. The problem is that getting those top guys is way, way harder than getting the supporting cast.

The habs may be OK if:
Dach will either have to fit as a top 2 center or as a shutdown center.
Slaf drives play.
Guhle and at least one other D become good top pairing guys.
At least one or two other prospects become top 4 D/ top6 F.
Goaltending works out.

But all of that is pretty unlikely. More likely the habs try to draft a top C next season, and they try to sign a top D and a G for 2025.

The problem with the current guys isn't so much accountability as what they can do. You can push Armia or Drouin or Hoffman as hard as you want and they won't become play driving top line players. All of them can contribute if you have those guys, and if the habs have a spot for them in a way they often didn't this year. Hughes has shown that he is at least trying to address this issue. It's not going to be easy, but the solution is to make sure that instead of having 4 guys who need top 6 minutes and PP time as snipers while other people on the line drive play and open space, you end up with 1 or 2 of those guys and you actually have the play driving guys who open space. Once you have the guys who will occupy 2 defenders and still keep the puck and threaten to score, guys the habs really didn't have last year, all those other guys will be effective. We'll see if any of the guys we have now can fill those roles.

Maybe Slaf on the top line and Dach on the second? Pretty optimistic. We'll see how the prospects work out, but one has to expect that many or most of the non 1OAs will bust.