So… are the people that hated the Igor contract the second it was signed and the people who insisted that you have to lock up your franchise goalie starting to see eye to eye or is the PGT just a humorous thread title?
I ask because I would much rather be Colorado and take my chances in the playoffs with Blackwood and Wedgewood at a combined 3.85M (next year it’s 6.75M when Blackwood’s extension kicks in) than pay any goalie 11.5M per year. I also don’t want to pay any winger who isn’t named Kaprizov, Rantanen or Tkachuk more than 11M per year (looking at you, Arti). You know who can have a 12M+ contract? Mackinnon, McDavid, Draisaitl, etc.
In other words, franchise centers. I’m being a bit hyperbolic because there will be exceptions I’m not thinking of, but now that we’re somewhat back to our normal amount of dysfunction, and not in our 2 month crisis spiral anymore, the same thing is as clear (to me, at least) today as it has been to many of us for years. No elite 1C, no point in paying anyone else to drag you to the playoffs.
All Shesterkin and Panarin will do is keep us firmly in the 10-20 range where we will always be playoff hopefuls, which means:
We’ll rarely see kids getting big minutes
We’ll buy at the TDL more often than not so we’ll never have a robust pipeline of young talent trickling up to the big club
We’ll never draft anywhere near high enough to get our hands on the type of center this team needs to ever hope to break the Cup drought.
Anytime I’ve ever mentioned (previously, I’m over it at this point, and it’s no longer realistic with Igor/unlikely because playoffs with Bread) the response from many was “if you think we’re bad now, wait til you see how bad we’d be without Panarin!” …Yeah, that’s the point, bucko. Bad enough to draft the next Celebrini or Hughes or Eichel, I’d hope. Ditto Shesterkin. “You don’t trade goalies who can single handedly win you a playoff series, you pay them.” Looks like that’s going to work out extremely well for us. Hey Igor, we scraped in as a WC, go steal 4 series for us! #strategy
I understand we weren’t as bad as we looked last month, but we simply are not good enough to win a Cup and there isn’t any other purpose for this roster than winning a Cup, which means it has to be taken apart and put back together.
You ever put together a piece of furniture and you get 90% of the way done (making it to the ECF) and then you realize that on step 4 of 18 you attached a piece backward and so you have to take the entire thing apart and put it back together if you want to complete it (win a Cup)? That’s us. It doesn’t matter how close we were. You can’t go forward until you take it apart and fix the problem(s). That’s been clear to me for a while, and is the only reason I had been SO pro trading everyone.
You can’t build around a one dimensional winger whose style of play is less effective in the playoffs. You can’t build from the net out. In my opinion, you can’t build around a 1D who can’t skate either because you need that dynamic driving force from a 1D if they’re going to be your building block. The common denominator for Cup winners over the last 25 years or so, is basically a Hall of Fame 1C. Even if they weren’t massive offensive producers, like Bergeron, that’s still a certified HHOF center. Kopitar. Barkov. They will be in the HHOF. Mika Zibanejad will not.
Building AROUND Igor’s 11.5 and Zib’s 8.5 and Fox’s 9.5 is not the way to ever end up with a true 1C. And having a goalie like Igor and a 1D like Fox, keeping Panarin, etc. will ensure we never even have a chance to acquire one in the first place. Which makes virtually everything this team does irrelevant because, unless we manage to defy 20+ years of history (and, let’s face it, NYR isn’t the lucky team to manage to do that), we simply aren’t Cup winners without a 1C. So we are going to pay some guys a LOT of money to basically tread water and make sure Dolan gets his playoff revenue and that’s that.
Also, who can help me get a gig as our columnist? I’m better than Larry lol
