It's weird when people keep saying I'm changing my tune or doing and about face. I've never been a big tank/rebuild guy. I mean, I was - like almost everyone else - from 2015-2019 when it was obvious the team was f***ed and that's the direction we needed to head. But I was saying that I'd be looked at buying on a trade/sign with Mark Stone at the 2019 deadline to pull us out of the tank. I was furious about the situation in 2020 when we should have been chasing Pietrangelos to add to our group and instead were losing Tanevs. I said in 2021 that Benning should be using picks to move out bad contracts - just not the abject idiocy of the OEL trade. And I've said from the second Benning was fired that the new management group needs to be aggressive about moving out Benning's trash in order to properly flush out the roster and try to get this core somewhat back on the rails that it went off of in 2020.
My messaging hasn't changed an iota in the last 4 years.
I hate tanking. I think incentivized losing goes against the ethos of sport and I badly want the league to go to an unweighted lottery so the whole tanking circus joke is permanently eliminated.
There are so many examples of this.
I'll keep saying it - people just aren't grasping how terrible our goaltending has been this year. 32nd and dead last in the NHL. First team in the .870s in 23 years. It's costing us about a goal/game relative to league average and even more than that relative to 'normal Demko' of prior years.
Yes, the team defense is bad. But it's been bad for years and Demko has shown himself to be a star-level goalie who could put up top numbers in spite of the defense. Instead our goaltending has absolutely cratered and has been the worst we've received since the 1980s.
And when you get goaltending like this, absolutely everything just falls apart.
Disagree on Horvat. This team is already in a poor position at C and D and you simply can't replace a high-producing, high-leverage C if you trade that player away. And we're going to get absolutely bent over at rental prices in a Horvat trade.
Once you re-sign Miller, you can't just let Horvat walk 40 games later.
As for the last sentence, yeah. It's not just our bad owner. This just isn't how sports works in real life. Fans have set an expectation for what should happen that is grounded in video games instead of reality, and then are having a tantrum when that expectation isn't what's happening.
Where would this team be in the standings if Thatcher Demko was healthy and performing at the level of the last 2 seasons, as expected?
Where would it be if Elias Pettersson was still moping around and didn't get back to looking all-world? Where would it be if Andrei Kuzmenko was closer in performance to Shirokov than Kaprizov? Did anyone think Bo Horvat would most likely score 50 this year? Demko's bad season is more impactful than any one of those, but if Horvat is a 25 goal scorer and Demko is simply average (bad by his standards), they're what, a 7th-9th seed instead of 12th?
I agree that they won't be bad enough to re-build even if they tried (and sure it would be unprecedented - but so were the Canucks' 2020 and 2021 offseasons), so the terminology is meaningless, and the chances at Bedard are a non-starter.
But even with your suggestion of being more aggressive with getting rid of the bad contracts - where/how are they going to generate enough accretive value to continue incrementally improving? This is what I don't get in a potential "keep building" by doubling down plan.
They have no prospects. Even with the best pro scouting (which we don't have), players that you've identified like Gage Gonclaves and Wyatt Johnston are (probably) highly valued by their teams. Other teams probably aren't as stupid as the Canucks.
Our current core pieces are okay, but they don't have the right mix (too much focus on the wings and the defense is atrocious) - just adding the right supplementary pieces probably isn't doing enough. They need to find a way to shift one or two core assets into two or three core assets, two years from now. A Miller trade could have done that, and a Horvat trade still can.
Trading Horvat isn't just getting back a rental piece - it provides $8m of cap that can be used elsewhere. Bo is a classically overvalued player. We can't just keep him because of a need for a singular direction with the core. Take the assets, and see if it's possible to re-allocate a portion of the money to a guy like Ivan Barbashev (who is having a bit of a down year on a similarly disappointing Blues team) but put up 60 points last season and has played center in the past. That's one very good shot at a core asset going forward. If you can get a 2023 1st (lottery ticket) and a package like Kotkaniemi (fringe) + Morrow/Drury (blue-chip) + Suzuki/Philly's 2024 2nd (long-shot fringe) from a team like Carolina, the "expected number" of core assets in two years is by *possibly* higher than one, as opposed to keeping a singular, highly paid Bo Horvat.
If they just run back the same way they have, Bo and Demko will most likely both regress back to their mean next season, which will make the team slightly better than this season for more money than this season. And JR just admit that they've had a tougher than expected time getting rid of money. So there's no guarantee, with no bad expiring contracts and a lower than expected cap next season, that it will get any easier, even if they get aggressive (retaining on Boeser, paying Myers' bonus, attaching a pick to Garland, etc.).
I guess I just don't see a path to keeping Horvat AND being able to add another core piece through free agency AND somehow solving the defense.
