honestly, if you gave them an average goalie instead of lundqvist, they would have been a lottery team this year. it's hilarious how poorly built they are year after year, always bringing in super star after super star expecting each one to be their saving grace when half their team is made up of ahl players.
The build isn't terrible. The system is terrible for the team they have built. The system stifles any offensive ability most of their players have, so the reason they suck offensively is not purely a factor of who takes the ice. If you want to talk about half of their starting defensemen being garbage, now that's another story.
I don't think so. Semin had the KHL as a fallback if his 1 year tryout failed. If Brad Richards has a bad year, his career is over from a money standpoint.
If you're talking about his ability to command a high salary (AAV at least), those days may be near over anyway (if he were to get amnestied). He's not getting bought out because he's worth $6 million a year in someone's eyes. Especially at his age, he's not getting anything too long or too lucrative elsewhere. And he doesn't have a lot of time to really prove he's worth some very lucrative/lengthy deal either. If he was a free agent in the off-season, his best bet is probably a 3 year deal,
maybe $4.5 mil a year, depending on the team. Maybe. Likely a stretch though with the cap going down. He has a better shot of getting 1 year (maybe even 2) for up to $6 mil from a team that is going to hover near the floor (essentially a team like the Islanders, although their approach may change since they were more competitive than anticipated). If he does that and plays well, he'll get himself a longer term. But there is little reason for any team to really open the wallet for him right now. He'll have a job on an NHL roster, but unless he's willing to be paid on a role player's salary ($2-4 million a year), he's not getting it.
the thing is, when a coach has been there as long as torts has, they should have been able to build a team that consisted mostly of players that were good for his system by now. they haven't. in fact they've done a pretty good job of getting rid of players that do.
that means either they're not built well, or the gm and coach have a different opinion on how a team should be built, meaning the coach probably never should have been hired in the first place.
Well, they did build a team for it, but like you said, got rid of those players. But that's just them being dumb. By the same token, don't forget that the system just might not work. At the very least, its not one that can sustain. It won a cup in Tampa, but obviously didn't last long enough or he would have lasted longer. The Rangers were good to a point, but not enough to say they had the personnel in place. They were as good as they were last year because Lundqvist was playing out of his mind. Now that he's merely been playing "very good" they're just not that impressive of a team. And just about everyone under-performs (or only can in select situations) on top of it. The problem seems to be the system mostly. And since the coach is an ass, you can just say Torts is the problem. Give him an extension.
