Once again, we have a pretty weak farm system at the moment, no draft picks to trade along with assets, and no real ELC talent this year or next to help in our defense or depth scoring.
We don't have top tier blue chippers in the system, because we aren't drafting in the lottery, but we have a solid prospect pool and a lot to look forward to. Many of our prospects are excelling beyond their draft position and are trending towards at least quality NHL depth, if not more. I recommend taking a read through our prospects thread for more information on what our prospects are doing.
We also have plenty of draft picks and assets to trade, if we wanted to. As for ELC talent this year, what do you think Knies and Robertson are? And that's not even counting Holmberg, McMann, and Woll, who are internal depth on ELC-like contracts and contributing this year. We're probably adding even more next year, with Cowan leading the OHL in P/GP, Minten already getting a taste of the NHL and captaining team Canada, Niemela excelling in the AHL, KHL rookie of the year Grebenkin potentially coming over, AHL rookie of the month Tverberg over PPG, etc. We're at the start of our first big wave of prospects since 2016, and that will help a ton.
You basically just stated that all you need is a hot goalie and a good top 6 and you'll win the cup.
I'm not sure how you got that from anything I said. There are many different ways to win a cup, and nothing is a guarantee.
What I said is that allocating significant money to certain areas is usually inefficient, and even when teams win on the backs of or with the help of those areas, it is not a result of allocating significant money to that area. It is a result of pieces within that area performing beyond their pay, and often just for those specific couple months.
Look at Colorado when they won, they had great depth on D. Their goaltending wasn't even great .902sv%, but they also had great depth scoring outside of their top 6.
Colorado didn't spend some abnormal amount on their defense though. They benefitted from Byram excelling on his ELC, and Manson being retained down to 2m.
Same story with their depth scoring. It wasn't from big contracts in their bottom six. It was from Nichushkin, excelling beyond his 2.5m pay. It was from Lehkonen excelling beyond his 1.15m pay. Pieces that got hot at the right time, not expensive pieces.
Look at Vegas last year, they were not top heavy, but rather distributed in terms of cap allocation across their lineup, as well as Hill rocking it. So your assessment of having to fluke into drafting a goalie, or having one get hot at the right time isn't really factual.
They literally had a goalie, who hadn't done anything of note prior, and who wasn't being paid very much, get hot at the right time.
As for their depth scoring? The likes of Stephenson, Barbashev, Marchessault, and Amadio performing well above their pay for that stretch.
None of these noted pieces on these teams are things we couldn't afford.
You just need "solid" goaltending to win, and you can buy that if you want too.
Not really though. The correlation between goalie pay and performance is incredibly weak. You can easily pay a ton and get garbage results in the playoffs, or pay basically nothing and have your goalie perform like a superstar in the playoffs. We've seen it a ton.
I won't get into your assessment of low correlation between defensive spending and cup wins. I need to see your data to refute your statement,
Rank the teams by defensive spending, and then rank the teams by defensive results ~25 games into a season, and you can see the relatively weak correlation for yourself.
We can match the defensive spending of teams that have won cups while still keeping our best players.
We do not have anywhere near the depth that any of the past 5 cup winners have had on D.
We've had defensive results in recent years that match and surpass the defensive results of recent cup winners.
We kind of abandoned defense this year, but we can get back there within our current core cap structure.
Can you provide me with any context surrounding your belief that paying 4 forwards half your cap leads to playoff success? I can't find one example of a team built like that winning.
That's because no team has really had the
opportunity to build like that in the first place. There are countless ways to win a cup. Teams have won spending half their cap on a collection of players that provide less impact than our core four, so it's unclear how people are coming to the conclusion that this can't work. Quite frankly, I don't care how other teams did stuff. That was their way, and everybody is different in some way. This is our best shot. Getting less impact out of that cap space isn't going to move us closer to a cup.
