Forgot about that one.
At the last minute. We had to trade Rolston to Tampa Bay because negotiations broke down and Rolston bolted. Money just is a convenient scapegoat in this case.
With Lemaire's system. The stuff I heard about Parrish and Lemaire, yeah I won't say. But it's Lemaire that played a big part of why some players didn't want to play in Minnesota.
Demitra didn't seem to want to be here. He just ended up getting traded.
And Sheppard had a fight with the organization.
This organization is known for sucking the offense out of players. And I don't fault players for avoiding the Wild. The franchise player has never scored more than 25 goals in his career, and is more known for his defensive side of things. Sounds like some place I want to play where the team is known more for defense than offense.
Parise will help (and so will Vanek) but this team will be a lunch pail type of team until Koivu retires. We're not going to be electric or dynamic. Just hard working and grindy. Nothing wrong with that but don't take it as an insult because that's what this team is. Even Parise isn't a very electric type of player. He's a elite talent because he's hard working and goes to the dirty spots.
That's why Zucker is so important for this organization. He's the only one really that can create offense and can be an electric talent. Granlund might be but he's not there yet.
For every player that may have been unhappy with Lemaire, there was a player who liked him. Every team has a player or two who aren't crazy about their coach at one point or another. It's not a shot at the team. It's just the way it is. You're not gonna have that many guys on a team who all prefer playing the style of hockey that their coach likes. Parrish knew what he was getting in to. He knew who our head coach was.
You mention that the Wild sucks the offense out of its players. My question is, how many of them have gone on to rack up goals on other teams. I can remember so many Nucks' fans predicting that Demo, Chouinard, and a few other former Wild players would start lighting it up after joining their high offense "open system" team. Guess what. Never happened. And where did Rolston's offense go? Gabby even struggled with the exception of one good year. I'd say one of the only guys who has done well is Dupuis, but take a look at his linemates. He got an upgrade.
Sheppard sucked, and he had no business fighting with this organization. Guy couldn't even drive an ATV.
Demo didn't want to be here, because he knew Gabby was on his way out. And he was often uncomfortable being forced to bounce around between different positions many games, because our GM didn't care to address our needs, which was magnified at the time due to injuries. Plus, Riser had a
very good way of burning bridges with his players. How many agents did he get into fights with? Yeah, some of those agents were dingleberries, but Riser didn't have brains or respect when it came to negotiations. But that's in the past. He's gone.
Different era.
Of course we've had a tighter system over the years. Not as tight as some people cry about though. This team has never had an equal balance when it comes to quality of forwards and defensemen. It's usually had to cover its tail for the crap up front. And then we've had boneheaded players on the backend who did nothing but throw "panic passes" up the boards. Just look at our forwards over the past decade. We went a good 3-5 years lacking decent centers alone! We had none. We needed some, but our GM thought it'd be better to fill that void with Chris Simon. He
refused to bring in the proper tools even when he had a coach who practically called him out on it during a post-game interview. And look at the lack of prospects we've had. This team had to buckle down on their blueline, because it never had the engines. It had no business crossing center ice. In that regard, yeah...players had a tight leash. But again, when they moved on and the leash was taken off, how well did they do? Most failed. Perhaps we didn't suck the offense out of them. Maybe they just lost a step or didn't have it to begin with.
