Is the Golden Knights' problem Jack Eichel?

[TheRumble]

Sabres fans trying to revise history. Eichel was a top three player in the league at his best for the Sabres. Add a 0 to the 3 and Tage Thompson hasn’t been that league wide this season. I’m not dunking on the Sabres. I’m a neutral fan that thinks the Sabre fan dunking is not well timed.

Maybe according to Sabres fans but most non-Sabre fans never had him higher than Top 10 I think.

 

[Dirty Dog]

Sabres fans trying to revise history. Eichel was a top three player in the league at his best for the Sabres. Add a 0 to the 3 and Tage Thompson hasn’t been that league wide this season. I’m not dunking on the Sabres. I’m a neutral fan that thinks the Sabre fan dunking is not well timed.

Nope, until tage is out scored by eichel, the dunking to stop Sabres fans from dunking can’t be dunked.

 

[MarkusKetterer]

Vegas was Cinderella the first two years but the growing pangs of the league are now catching up with them. Eichel was abused by Kruger in Buffalo with the expectations he could carry that whole team. You put McDavid in the atmosphere in Buffalo he would be a villan too. As to the surgery it appears Eichel was right in his choice. Tyler Johnson had the same surgery this year after Eichel had his. I point to Buffalo ownership getting too involved in the game where they have little knowledge. It cost them Eichel and nearly cost them Skinner who since Kruger was canned has had a good comeback. Buffalo is finally turning the corner after more than a decade of suckage. This is the direction Vegas is headed right now there cap is spent in wonkie places and that alone will cause the house of cards to collapse for a while.

FWIW, Jessie Pegula would have been a better coach for the Sabres than Ralph Krueger was.

 

[MarkusKetterer]

There is still wide gap between the idea of Jack Eichel vs. the reality of Jack Eichel.

The thought that Jack Eichel is an elite talent, who is one of the top forwards in the game is prevalent still. He may yet "arrive" one day but the reality that outside of one season, he has yet to live up to that idea in his first 6 seasons.

I chuckle at so many giving him a pass on this season when he was the one that chose to rush back.

His camp was the one that said that his preferred surgery promised a quicker return, that his preferred surgery would make him a "30% better player".

Considering his salary, his conduct, he deserves all the criticisms thrown his way.

And not for nothing, I’m sure he rushed back to play for the US at the Olympics. If I recall he played 3-4 games before the NHL put the kibosh on that.

 

[HitterD]

I still think Jack hits the 100 point threshold with Vegas next year. The guy has the tools and he definitely takes losing hard.

That might not make him a clutch performer or a good leader, but the talent is there.

He was, it should be noted, able to practice without contact for most of the time he was sidelined. So it wasn't like he went from 0 to 60. But overall, he played a very small amount of NHL hockey the two years prior to returning, and I imagine he was quite rusty.

You may well be correct. Lots can happen in a new season. I do know that anyone even suggesting Gaudreau was a top 10 left winger in the NHL at the beginning of this season, let alone the top 5-10 player he has been this season, was laughed at by the majority of rival fans.

one big season can change all of perception. Eichel is certainly capable of it, which is why I wanted him on the Flames.

 

[TheBeard]

You can't do that in baseball either, honestly.

I think the teams that tend to make it to the playoffs tend to be the teams with higher payrolls, but there are definitely more exceptions like TB.

 

[Sad People]

Give him a break he had an operation done on his neck less than a year ago If hes struggling like he is now at the end of next season yeah we can be critical of him

 

[Stephen]

Sabres fans trying to revise history. Eichel was a top three player in the league at his best for the Sabres. Add a 0 to the 3 and Tage Thompson hasn’t been that league wide this season. I’m not dunking on the Sabres. I’m a neutral fan that thinks the Sabre fan dunking is not well timed.

If Eichel was recently a top three player in the NHL, it would have been in an alternate universe.

Pretty nice to see Buffalo moving on with a healthy team concept post-Eichel. Good cast of hungry young players happy to be in Buffalo and growing together.

 

[Enniskillen]

Something in the air when Eichel enters the locker room.

 

[Daz28]

This is ridiculous, and I imagine almost everyone but the OP knows the answer. Might he be moving forward? Maybe, but the guy had played 29% of one season with a team, and it's time to consider if he's the problem???? Unreal.

 

[Stephen]

I always find it problematic when the highest paid, highest scoring guy isn't a leader on your team. It's a recipe for disaster. We can lie to ourselves and say he doesn't need to be a leader as long as he's scoring goals, but I imagine it takes it's toll on the locker room when you have a guy making big bucks skipping his defensive zone assignment, not blocking shots and coasting back to the bench on a line change who then skips talking to the media after a loss and still collects the biggest paycheck.

Whenever there's a debate about whether X player should contribute Y intangible in addition to his Z scoring, and there's a vocal pushback from fans saying as long as he provides the production, he's not there for other stuff, it's a red flag.

If you have a good centerpiece player, that guy should be always trying to evolve his game to be more and the willingness to work on the game is what's important and sets the tone. If he's only going to be a scorer or whatever, it's a clear sign that he's probably better off as someone else's sidekick and not your cornerstone.

 

[zenthusiast]

How about this: jack eicheL

 

[Pavel Buchnevich]

Uh, I don't think he was ever that, or ever will be.

COVID season he was. He would’ve been nominated for the Hart if he didn’t suffer a late-season injury.

 

[Pavel Buchnevich]

Maybe according to Sabres fans but most non-Sabre fans never had him higher than Top 10 I think.

Did you miss the COVID season?

 

[PunchImlach is Alive]

Did you miss the COVID season?

Did you? You want to hang this on an outlier season with a fraction of the competition? I wouldn't have even put Eichel in Top 5 in the East during that.

 

[haseoke39]

COVID season he was. He would’ve been nominated for the Hart if he didn’t suffer a late-season injury.

Nah. Finished eighth in Hart voting that year. Zero voters put him in the top 3. And he played 68 out of 69 games for the Sabres.

 

[MarkusKetterer]

Whenever there's a debate about whether X player should contribute Y intangible in addition to his Z scoring, and there's a vocal pushback from fans saying as long as he provides the production, he's not there for other stuff, it's a red flag.

If you have a good centerpiece player, that guy should be always trying to evolve his game to be more and the willingness to work on the game is what's important and sets the tone. If he's only going to be a scorer or whatever, it's a clear sign that he's probably better off as someone else's sidekick and not your cornerstone.

It’s why Crosby is a GOAT. He worked hard at improving every aspect of his game. Now he’s the standard for “grinder”, even though everyone considers him to be a playmaker.

 

[Chainshot]

Yep, forgot the details on that. Broke it on the ice doing shooting drills days before training camp and missed most or all of camp.

At least that was the claim.

 

[flashsabre]

Someone is trying to revise history but it is not Sabres fans.

 

[Doohickie]

The day before Eichel's debut the Knights had a 90% chance to make the playoffs. They now have less than a 50% chance.

Now, I know there are other factors in play. But they still have a good team that at minimum should be a wildcard team.

Is Eichel just a magnet for bad luck? It seems losing follows him wherever he goes...

Don’t be that guy

I'll be that guy: I think there are several different Eichels. One is a very talented hockey player. One is a Masshole. One is the inadvertent conduit of, like you said, bad luck.

In my lizard brain, he was the fruit of the Tank Curse and became the embodiment of the Tank Curse. By moving him, the curse was shifted from Buffalo to Vegas.

He actually was the only guy that played well tonight. Horrible cap managment is taking the Knights down.
Lets just say guys are probably sitting on LTIR longer than anticipated due to cap issues. Its a mess

This is true for much of his time in Buffalo. He was the best player on the ice, but for some reason it never led to consistent winning.

It's almost like with Jack, there's some kind of a moral there about flying too close to the sun or something. Both teams reached for Jack and grabbed him as if he was some kind of brass ring that would magically transform their teams into winners, when the only way to do that is to improve the whole team holistically. There are no easy cures, you have to put in the work.

The Golden Knights did it the right way from the start, but then they dismantled all that was good about the team in an effort to get better. They lost the chemistry, the identity, the community of all the players and coaches pulling in the same direction. Adding Jack Eichel is exactly the wrong move if a team's chemistry is lacking.

It's not even really his fault. He's always been the best player. But when he joined the Sabres, then-GM Tim Murray blew all his draft and prospect capital to bring in very good, but flawed, players to jump start the build. Players like Evander Kane and Zach Bogosian were (and are) good players, but they distracted from the team's chemistry and pulled Jack in with them. He was hot stuff and wanted to have fun. Murray brought in token character veterans like Brian Gionta and Josh Gorges, but they just weren't fun as the party guys. So the locker room ended up splintered into several cliques and factions.

He brings his points to the ice (but don't kid yourself, he's not a 100 point player) but it's about Jack and not as much about the team. He doesn't mean to be that way I think, it's just that he's always been The Guy his whole life, the one who carries the team. So he's concerned with the other players that can help him with that and the rest are non-entities to him.

I think Kevyn Adams wanted to move Jack the minute he was made GM. He knew there was talent there but he wasn't part of the solution in Buffalo. Owner Terry Pegula wasn't ready to part with him yet so instead of the rebuild Adams wanted to do, he did a simpler retooling and tried to make the playoffs with Jack (they nearly made it in GM Jason Botterill's last season, the one one shortened by Covid, but narrowly missed out). So everyone though just add a few quality NHL players and that would get them into the playoff hunt. Enter Taylor Hall, Eric Staal, Cody Eakin, Riley Sheahan, etc. But when Jack played that year, he played injured and those pieces were, in total, not character pieces, and besides Ralph Krueger was an awful coach and didn't now how to build the team's character. The point is though, the 2020-21 season was Jack's last stand in Buffalo. They tried to build a roster around him to try to get to the playoffs and it didn't work... not just because of Jack, but because of his injuries last year and because the players brought in simply couldn't be integrated into a winning system by Ralph Krueger. So much for trying to make Jack happy.

The ADR procedure was a red herring. The real point was that the Sabres by the end of last season were ready to move on from Jack and they weren't going to take the risk of ADR and possibly hurt his trade value. It wasn't that they didn't think it would work, they just didn't want to assume the risk.

In the meantime, the magic of the early years of Vegas was fading.... actually was ruined by trying to do too much too fast and disrupting the team chemistry. The thinking was that Jack Eichel would make the Golden Knights a winning team. The Sabres knew better but they happily complied with VGK's zeal to land a #1 center.

The Golden Knights need work on rejuvenating the team in the mold of the first year: No stars, all in. Everyone on the team is important. If you're looking for a quick fix, trust me, Jack Eichel isn't it.

 

[Doohickie]

As a Canucks fan watching the Game tonight, Jack’s body language appears to show he’s very frustrated & is not responding well when he misses an opportunity.

This was Jack's body language the whole time in Buffalo.

 

[Doohickie]

As to the surgery it appears Eichel was right in his choice. Tyler Johnson had the same surgery this year after Eichel had his. I point to Buffalo ownership getting too involved in the game where they have little knowledge. It cost them Eichel

If the Pegulas had intended to move forward with Eichel in the lineup they would have let him get the ADR. They truth was they were already moving on from him before the ADR was necessary and they didn't want to hurt his trade value if the surgery went awry. Once they were moving on from him, they didn't want to assume the risk of the surgery not working. Stictly a business decision.

 

[nickdawg95]

Vegas is 2nd (By a small margin) in man games lost. i wonder if that has something to do with how their season is going >???!!!


nah eichel suxks total cancer also looks like the guy in highschool that used to shove my head in the toilet and stole my prom date. eat doo doo eichel.

 

[Pavel Buchnevich]

Nah. Finished eighth in Hart voting that year. Zero voters put him in the top 3. And he played 68 out of 69 games for the Sabres.

Aren’t you a Sabres fan? You are really trying to ignore that he was playing injured for the last few weeks before COVID and struggled then? Before then, he nearly had one of the worst teams in the league in a playoff spot. Most viewed it at the time as Draisaitl, MacKinnon, Panarin, and Eichel as the main candidates for the Hart. He faded those last few weeks, but was very much top 3 for most of that season.

 

[haseoke39]

Aren’t you a Sabres fan? You are really trying to ignore that he was playing injured for the last few weeks before COVID and struggled then? Before then, he nearly had one of the worst teams in the league in a playoff spot. Most viewed it at the time as Draisaitl, MacKinnon, Panarin, and Eichel as the main candidates for the Hart. He faded those last few weeks, but was very much top 3 for most of that season.

Seems like a lot of "many people are saying" to me. I don't recall his Hart case being much more than a pity vote for an elite player on a crap team. I recall him being somewhere in the scoring race briefly that year, but there's more to the MVP than a hot November.