Edge
Kris King's Ghost
I hear the proposals, and I do follow the logic they're basing the opinion, even if I don't necessarily agree with it. But I just really can't see ADA going anywhere --- not unless there is some landscape altering deal that reverberates around the league.
Let's hop in a DeLorean and time travel back to June 1, 2017 for a moment.
What if someone came on here and said, "Okay guys we have a chance to acquire a soon to be 22 year old RHD. He's on the smaller side, but he plays with an edge. He has some baggage from his past, he's going to need to be steered in the right direction, and his defense will be average at best. However, over the second half of his age 23 season he's going to produce at a 50 point pace, and he's going to produce at over a 60 point pace through the first half of his age 24 season. What do you think, and are you potentially ready to give this guy a $5-6 million contract after his age 24 season?"
Personally, I think this board would've been over the moon and talking about how we never get guys like this, how this is exactly what we've been waiting for, how great it would've been to have Dan Boyle in his prime and not the end of his career, and how those are the types of players you roll the dice on with contracts.
Power up the time circuits and return to good ol' 2020, and I don't know why that would change for us.
Fox is awesome. He's great. But he's not motivating me to move ADA.
Lundkvist is awesome, he's a hell of a prospect. But he's exactly that --- a prospect. And I don't think he's a replacement for ADA --- they are very different players.
We need left wings, I get it. I'd love to add a young stud on the left side. But I think we can do that without having to move ADA.
There's a lot of maybe's out there --- and that includes ADA's future production. But where he is now is a result of continual progress, not a sudden surge out of left field. In a word of question marks and maybes, I feel a lot more comfortable holding onto actual progress and dynamic results at the NHL level, over optimism that somehow we can replicate that same progress and success again. The odds say we can't. Even if we produce results that are very good, it still would be hard to trump what we have right now.
At some point, when we're fortunate, there's not much ceiling left to aim for. At some point, you reach the top floor, and outside of a generational talent, you're just about getting production that's as good as you're going to find from all but the top 1 or 2 percent of players in the game. So if ADA's offensive potential puts him in that 96th or 97th percentile, I'm not banking on the guys behind him somehow hitting 98 or 99. Nor is my first choice to move someone in the 97th percentile, for someone who is in the 90th percentile --- with the full understanding that even a guy in the 90th percentile is special and rare.
