The fact that the guy with the most to lose playing Staal continues to run him out there is not meaningless or a cop out in my eyes. I know that the analytics are bad for Staal but he must bring something. Does he get the toughest matchups? I know he's pretty bad when pinned in his own end and he doesn't have any offensive game. But he seems to me pretty good at clogging the neutral zone and he was certainly more aggressive under Quinn. Like most things, I don't think it's all black-and-white.
My guess is that this season he starts as the second pairing LD and then moves down to the third pair when/if one of the youngsters (I guess that's either Hajek or Rykov) steps up. And he's probably pretty well-suited to that kind of role.
Yeah that’s reasonable. Though 11m a year in 4-5 years may be worth a very different caliber of player than it is today.
Brendan Smith is one of the better defencemen in the league at breaking up plays in the NZ. Whatever your opinion is on Smith's overall ability as a defenceman, it clearly isn't enough to be good at that particular aspect.
QoC is a pretty weak crutch to use. But we've gone over this before, I think.
It actually is irrelevant because of the amount of stupidity we see in the league daily from front offices.
Staal did suck and he was definitely not our best D at defending. There is plenty of evidence to support this.3. In addition, nobody is saying that Staal should win a Norris. It is certainly possible to — suck — and still be our best D at defending.
Our blueline was hardly good last season.
A lot of truth to this
I thought we were going to be civil from now on? You can just @ me or quote my post rather than taking what seems like a jab and trying to slip away without notice.
It was amusing that the two of them were better separate from each other (but still bad) than when they were together.
There is a lot more than goes into quality of competition than just "he's playing the tough minutes so that means he's frequently being asked to play against the top lines"
That is so dead on balls accurate(can anyone guess that movie reference?). Perfect example: I work in an operating room. We have this guy who’s been there for 45 years no joke. He’s retiring next year and he said completely checked out. He missed 3 months this winter because he cut his thumb on a knife and got 3 stitches, seriously. He milked out the injury for 3 months then came back a few months ago. Since then he literally does nothing on the job. Walks around, talks to people, doesn’t help anyone, sits in the lounge watches tv, so when we see him actually doing work we all look the other way and don’t help him. Management knows he’s a liability but they won’t do anything about him. Every time we raise a complaint they laugh. They know they can’t so anything about him so they’re just riding out the remaining year and that’s that. So your analogy was spot on.
