GDT: Jets @ Devils, 7:00 PM, MSG

[Cheddabombs]

Time for the mac attack

 

[OlfactoryHughes]

Tin foil hat time: Or you give the guy that's up for a contract next year the harder matchups to control next year's price?

Or if you are not so conspiracy theorist:. To determine his worth

Also helps shelter vanecek a little too, keep his confidence sky high.

 

[Bleedred]

Managing goalies when you have a playoff cushion is also way different than when you're not in must-win mode every game. Plus since Vanecek doesn't have a history of big workloads and Blackwood doesn't have a history of staying healthy we'll likely play them a 2-1 split in the immediate future, as long as Vitek still has a grip on the #1. Wouldn't surprise me if Blackwood wound up playing two of the home games (today included) since the schedule gets compressed this week.

Maybe the Philly game next Saturday? If I'm not mistaken, that's the 2003 cup 20th anniversary night lol. I think they had the 95 one against the Flyers also, but they had the 2000 one against the Stars, didn't they? I was kind of surprised they didn't do the 95 one against the Red Wings, but maybe they only wanna do them in February-March and the Red Wings didn't come here that late that year? And of course the Ducks played our second home game here this year back in October.

I wanna say we lost the 2000 game, but we won the 95 game and I think Kinkaid played? It might have been Domingue in the 2000 game lol. The only memorable thing of the night was Petr Sykora's cup skating lap.

Tin foil hat time: Or you give the guy that's up for a contract next year the harder matchups to control next year's price?

Or if you are not so conspiracy theorist:. To determine his worth

Or you don't care what that shit bag makes next year because he's gonna be some other team's problem? He can be replaced by Schmid for under a million a year.

And even if Schmid isn't that good? He won't be any worse than Blackwood, I'm pretty confident of that. Worst case scenario it's a wash in performance and even in that case you're saving over $2 million a year to spend elsewhere.

You wanna keep costs down? Let him walk and replace with an ELC goalie/less than $1 million goalie we already have in-house. If you're worried about costs, the easiest thing to do is to not re-sign him.

 

[Dialamo]

Time for the mac attack

I'm ready to have several Mac attacks this evening. Go Devils!

 

[JimEIV]

Maybe the Philly game next Saturday? If I'm not mistaken, that's the 2003 cup 20th anniversary night lol. I think they had the 95 one against the Flyers also, but they had the 2000 one against the Stars, didn't they? I was kind of surprised they didn't do the 95 one against the Red Wings, but maybe they only wanna do them in February-March and the Red Wings didn't come here that late that year? And of course the Ducks played our second home game here this year back in October.

I wanna say we lost the 2000 game, but we won the 95 game and I think Kinkaid played? It might have been Domingue in the 2000 game lol. The only memorable thing of the night was Petr Sykora's cup skating lap.


Or you don't care what that shit bag makes next year because he's gonna be some other team's problem? He can be replaced by Schmid for under a million a year.

And even if Schmid isn't that good? He won't be any worse than Blackwood, I'm pretty confident of that. Worst case scenario it's a wash in performance and even in that case you're saving over $2 million a year to spend elsewhere.

You wanna keep costs down? Let him walk and replace with an ELC goalie/less than $1 million goalie we already have in-house. If you're worried about costs, the easiest thing to do is to not re-sign him.

Letting him walk probably makes sense. But you might need to be comfortable with Vanecek playing 50/60 next year?

 

[NJDevs26]

Vanecek's already going to be on the low end of the 50-60 level this year, next season workload shouldn't be as big an issue with him.

 

[Bleedred]

I questioned a couple starts Blackwood had earlier in the season, because he seemed to get the harder of the two options, but then I wondered if Lindy was playing it safe for games he expects us to win? It’s easier to stomach a bad game/loss to a tough opponent if you always beat the teams you know you should beat.

Earlier in the year it was pretty obvious they were giving Blackwood the ball first. They let Vitek run with it for a little while, but after playing 3 in a row and winning 3 in a row, they randomly went back to Blackwood for the Vancouver game (who he's like 5-0-0 with against with a .950%+ and 2 shutouts I think) and after he won that, they came right back with him against Edmonton and that was the game he got injured in and would be out the next month and a half.

It felt like the only time they let Vitek play 3 in a row this year while Blackwood was actually healthy was back in late October when he played Detroit, shutout Colorado and the Columbus game where we blew them out of the building. But then we found out Blackwood was nursing a shoulder injury or something? It didn't cause him not to dress for a game, but it did cause him to miss a practice where the EBUG was filling in for him the week before he was injured in Edmonton.

I think recently they did let him go 3 games in a row while he was dressed without a start.

When he beat Seattle 10 days ago, if that were earlier in the season? He would have been in the next game.

But Vitek has been the guy now for so long that I think you'd have to see him really struggle for quite a few games before Blackwood gets more than just load management starts.

They tried again with Blackwood when Vitek was struggling in December and he came back from injury, He beat Florida and they let him play Boston next game and he allowed 4 goals on like 20 shots in the first 2 periods and got pulled and Lindy really threw him under the bus in that post game. They let Vitek play the next two, the first of which was a 2-1 loss to Boston, which is his last regulation loss to date. After those two games, they put Blackwood back in for a random non-back to back against Carolina and it was like ''Here we go again! He couldn't even sit for 3 games in a row!''. My theory is that since it was the dad's trip and his dad was in town, they gave him that game so his dad could see him play one. Because they didn't randomly come back with him after a couple more Vitek games after that. He actually went almost two weeks without a start, but he was not dressed for one of the starts he was going to get and Schmid was called up and played it.

 

[JimEIV]

Vanecek's already going to be on the low end of the 50-60 level this year, next season workload shouldn't be as big an issue with him.

It'll be close...He's got 33 starts right now and there are 27 games left. If he gets 70% of the remaining, which seems high, he'll get 52 starts.

Still he's never had more than 36 starts in a season

Edit: actually my numbers are off... I'm counting tonight's game as "available"

If Blackwood starts tonight there are only 26 games remaining for him to start. 70% would be 18 on 26 as opposed to 19 on 27... hardly different but still.

 

[MasterofGrond]

I'm fine with starting vanecek 50-60 next season. He's been good this year, pretty durable to date, and I think if anything has been better under a more consistent workload given he's been a top 10 goalie this season.

Plus Schmid has been totally acceptable NHL backup quality across the AHL and NHL last two years. Which is more than I can say about Blackwood.

 

[Bleedred]

I'm really not proclaiming Schmid as some kind of messiah or anything, but even if all he could do was .899% next year, he's gonna be way cheaper than the guy that's been doing .890% something for pretty much the better part of 3 seasons now.

Blackwood isn't a good goalie. His AHL career was not good, so it's not like he was really dominant and then caught covid and started getting injured and sucking from there and out of nowhere. His last two years in the AHL were very poor. He was even sent to the ECHL in his second AHL season.

Blackwood was a very hot topic here back in 2018, before he even saw NHL action. There was talk that odds were low of him having a good NHL career after the season he had just had in the AHL. And these weren't my arguments, I was just a spectator and didn't really care much about him as it would be at least a couple seasons before we really needed to worry about him.

Then he was called up in December of 2018 and was the only positive goalie performance on the team that year, as well as the next year.

And bad goalies don't play every game. The closest example I could give to a goalie that plays bad almost every game is current Jonathan Quick. He gets lit up like every time he plays these days and overcommits on everything, plays on his ass or belly all game long. Takes himself way out of the net and is way too aggressive.

Jonathan Quick in 2023 is probably no better than if you put a good high school goalie or average college goalie out there. There's bad NHL goalies like Blackwood and then there's just absolutely non-NHL caliber goalies like current Jonathan Quick that literally play bad just about every game they get in.

Quick this year is like the first 9 games of Schneider in both the 18-19 and 19-20 seasons, only there's no .920% hot streak market correction after it that catapults him into the low .900's.

 

[Bleedred]

Who knows? Maybe Blackwood gets a shutout today and all the sudden he's a good goalie again lol.

Just imagine!

It's easy if you try

Right @My3Sons ?

 

[JimEIV]

I'm fine with starting vanecek 50-60 next season. He's been good this year, pretty durable to date, and I think if anything has been better under a more consistent workload given he's been a top 10 goalie this season.

Plus Schmid has been totally acceptable NHL backup quality across the AHL and NHL last two years. Which is more than I can say about Blackwood.

You ready to start Schmid 22 to 32 times next year? Is he ready for that?

 

[JimEIV]

So we're going to do a rookie goalie for 25-ish games, with Luke and Nemec in the lineup full time next season?

What could go wrong?

 

[Triumph]

You ready to start Schmid 22 to 32 times next year? Is he ready for that?

Thankfully there are more than three goalies in the NHL. They will get a veteran backup, ditch Blackwood, and be comfortable with Schmid as a third option.

 

[JimEIV]

Thankfully there are more than three goalies in the NHL. They will get a veteran backup, ditch Blackwood, and be comfortable with Schmid as a third option.

Wait...a veteran backup is going to cost nothing? I thought we were letting Blackwood walk to save money...

I just saw recently the average salary of all 74 goalies in the NHL this season is 3.3million....isn't that going to be what a veteran backup cost?

Then why not just keep Blackwood?

 

[Guttersniped]

I have a hockey news from the year 2000 or 2001.

There's an article on DiPietro, who was said to be ''The best goalie drafted since Martin Brodeur 10 years ago''.

That probably wasn't such an outlandish statement, as that was just only 10 years after Marty was drafted. It wasn't like it was 20 or 30 years later, but it's just kind of sad because of what DiPietro became.

Ironically, the best goalie drafted since Brodeur actually was taken in that 2000 draft, just wayyyyyyy later and under really no one's radar. And the hockey news probably didn't even know who the hell he was prior to 2005. I'm sure the Swedish publications did.

I will one day dig this up. I know it's in this house somewhere. I haven't seen it since I moved in here in 2011, but it's put away somewhere.

Well, DiPietro did go 1st, the Hockey News was always Conventional Wisdom Central.

These were the goalie drafted in the 1st round:

No one else offered any real competition at the time.

Well, ok, except the one guy the Islanders drafted 3 years earlier at #4.

Few competitions are as fiercely competitive as Worst Mike Milbury trade but Congratulations Roberto Luongo and Olli Jokinen for Mark Parrish and Oleg Kvasha!

Others were nightmarishly bad, like those made to clear salary (Palffy) or Yashin lol, but this was the ultimate Galaxy Brain Milbury moment where everyone knew he was being a complete idiot except him. The actual players involved thought it was weirdly bad hockey trade.

Mike Milbury hasn’t snuck back on TV somewhere, has he? I have this irrational fear this smug dumb f*** will pop up on ESPN or something.

I was very amused when I learned Doug “acquired Kris Draper for $1” Maclean was a commentator in Canada.

He’s the other GM who opinion I would least like to hear, so it makes sense that he spent years getting paid to give it. (You calling Jarmo a Rich Man’s Doug MacLean was full on abusive lol.)

 

[Bleedred]

So we're going to do a rookie goalie for 25-ish games, with Luke and Nemec in the lineup full time next season?

What could go wrong?

At what point do we throw the rookie goaltender in for 25 games?

He already played 9 games in about 1.5 months this year at the NHL level. Actually 8 of them were in the first 1.5 months and the 9th was a couple weeks later.

Could he really do any worse than .890%-something like the decrepit #29 has been doing for 70+ games now?

And even if he did, he's gonna be cheap. He ain't gonna cost $3-$4 million or whatever his qualifying offer is, while we're wondering why we had to sign him and why we're short on cap space at the deadline because we decided to re-sign Blackwood.

If we're gonna spend that much money, we could probably get somebody considerably better than Blackwood with that money.

I don't think 25 games for a rookie goalie is necessarily a problem, as long as it's not like the way Daws got 25 games last year, in his first North American pro season, where he probably played like 20 of those games in like a 32-35 game stretch at one point.

 

[Bleedred]

Well, DiPietro did go 1st, the Hockey News was always Conventional Wisdom Central.

These were the goalie drafted in the 1st round:
View attachment 653099

No one else offered any real competition at the time.

Well, ok, except the one guy the Islanders drafted 3 years earlier at #4.

Few competitions are as fiercely competitive as Worst Mike Milbury trade but Congratulations Roberto Luongo and Olli Jokinen for Mark Parrish and Oleg Kvasha!

Others were nightmarishly bad, like those made to clear salary (Palffy) or Yashin lol, but this was the ultimate Galaxy Brain Milbury moment where everyone knew he was being a complete idiot except him. The actual players involved thought it was weirdly bad hockey trade.

Mike Milbury hasn’t snuck back on TV somewhere, has he? I have this irrational fear this smug dumb f*** will pop up on ESPN or something.

I was very amused when I learned Doug “acquired Kris Draper for $1” Maclean was a commentator in Canada.

He’s the other GM who opinion I would least like to hear, so it makes sense that he spent years getting paid to give it. (You calling Jarmo a Rich Man’s Doug MacLean was full on abusive lol.)

That's actually some list there.

A couple of good goalies in between Brodeur and DiPietro, but no one really elite, other than Luongo and to a lesser extent Giguere. Thibault had a decent career, Can you really consider Cloutier a decent career? He played a considerable number of games and a good season or but...... He played really small and gave up some backbreakers that made him famous. I remember Jamie Storr, but I don't think he became anything great. Marc Denis was solid, but he was stuck on expansion Columbus in his prime. Biron had a good career and Boucher did, though looked like he was going to have a much more promising career than he did.

Damphousse LOL.

Where is Ari Ahonen? Wasn't he 1999?

Brian Finley and Brent Krahn were legendary busts. Even more suspect than the Rangers with Blackburn and Montoya a few years apart in the top-10. 5 combined NHL apperances between the two of them. 4 for Finley and 1 from Krahn.

I read something a long time ago about Brian Finley and he actually became a cop. He retired from hockey when he was still in his 20's and went into law enforcement. You always gotta cover your tracks and have something else lined up, just in case it doesn't work out, right? Even if you're the 6th overall pick in an NHL draft!

 

[MasterofGrond]

You ready to start Schmid 22 to 32 times next year? Is he ready for that?

he played 38 last year and is on pace for more than that this year, I think.

I'm fine with it. See if he can do it, and if he can't then sort out a veteran option.

 

[Bleedred]

he played 38 last year and is on pace for more than that this year, I think.

I'm fine with it. See if he can do it, and if he can't then sort out a veteran option.

We can literally get this summer's version of Vitek and it would cost less per year than Blackwood's qualifying offer or about the same.

I'm not saying we'll hit on him like we did Vitek and it might wind up being a bust like Nedeljkovic was, but if we're gonna pay another goalie $3-$4 million next year it really shouldn't be this guy. I'm just ready for the Mackenzie Blackwood experience to end and be over.

Of course getting another Vanecek would likely involve a 2nd or 3rd round pick, so I'm not saying to go out and get another Vanecek.

What I'm saying is we can go out and get another Vanecek-like goalie and it wouldn't cost us any more money for next year than Blackwood's qualifying offer. There's just no guarantee that he won't perform closer to a Nedeljkovic or something than Vanecek this year.

 

[Richer's Ghost]

Thank You - CapFriendly - NHL Salary Caps

Thank you for the amazing 9 years

www.capfriendly.com

Plenty of $1.5M zip code names there capable to backup and play 30 games.

 

[Emperoreddy]

Chance to go 4 up on the Rags with even games played.

 

[Emperoreddy]

Time for the mac attack

The other jiggle burger with eyes might be king

 

[SJinNewJersey]

Chance to go 4 up on the Rags with even games played.

 

[MasterofGrond]

I know Blackwood is bad. Schmid might only be bad.