Going from Fabbro to Stastney is a significant downgrade.
Zito is an awesome GM and Maurice is a great coach who could probably get a bunch of bottom pairing dmen back to the finals, lol.
Why would he be available for free? There is literally nobody to spend the money on and it would decimate their dcore even further.
Montour was better in 22/23 than 23/24. No way that Zito would pay more than what he pays Gus ($5.75m). Brandon won the cup and could sign the deal of his life time. So this wasn't a surprise for me an all. I was surprised that Zito didn't bring OEL back but 4 x $3.5m is just too much and too long. The player is injury prone and not young. I thought that he's worth 2 x $2.5m. So both decisions were understandable.
That's a really ugly right side. Trouba isn't a good player.
I'm not at all sure the Preds would see it that way. So far Stastney looks very good. They do have a lot of similarities as players, in terms of being smaller guys whose primary competency is skating and using their skating to play their position and control gaps and so on well. But for whatever reason, the Preds don't seem to like Fabbro, and I'm sure given the current Cap situation they'd be even more inclined to prefer Stastney over Fabbro.
Totally agreed with that. I think the Preds will probably just end up placing Glass on waivers as a first try. Fabbro shouldn't be impossible to move either. If the Preds had to take a 5th round pick or something for him, I could see them doing that. There's not going to be any gaudy big moves for a Trouba, and they won't be trading players they actually want to keep like Sissons or Carrier. It's just going to be a matter of maximizing the tiny tiny return they might get on Glass/Fabbro, and that's the end of things. (Even zero net return on those 2 would probably ultimately satisfy Trotz).
Florida wouldn't risk moving major piece like Ekblad after just winning a Cup. Especially after just losing Montour
Cats should have traded Ekblad signed Montour. Could have got young asset or high pick in draft.
Ekblad has one year left and might sign a discount retirement contract. Montour, as much as I liked him, would be a bad fit long term. Glad he got paid.
