PacificOceanPotion
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- Jun 19, 2009
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Speculation: Summer 2018 Roster Discussion Part IV
- Thread starter rangerssharks414
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Okay, it's a 99.9% chance none are. At best, we have some middle six guys met likely, and that's fine considering they are free assets.
hohosaregood
Banned
- Sep 1, 2011
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Sorry I wasn't clear. I actually agree with you. I think this sudden surge of Thornton disrespect is total bullshit. If this is how people are going to disrespect him, they never should've pretended to love him before.
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hohosaregood
Banned
- Sep 1, 2011
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I'm holding out hope that one of them is the next Marchessault
- Sep 29, 2016
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Karlsson is absolutely gonna be a superstar...at collecting pucks after practice...
Juxtaposer
Outro: Divina Comedia
Duncan Siemens is f***ing horrible and being picked 11th overall was a joke even at the time.
That’s right, I forgot that being a Sharks fan made us obliged to insist that a 0.76 career playoff points per game average is good for a player of Joe Thornton’s caliber. I forgot that loving Joe Thornton means that I have to sweep his failures under the rug and pretend he’s some playoff god who has only ever been hard done by.
Acquiring Joe Thornton was obviously not a mistake, and you won’t find anyone here who thinks it was. But to act like Thornton’s mediocre playoff scoring has nothing to do with this team’s failures to win a Cup is to willfully ignore his flaws.
spintops
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- Sep 13, 2013
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Tim Heed*
Can add late round picks that have been produced // added to prospect pool. Has kept depth in the entire system, Barraduda squad has been much better IMO and they look good again this year
Maladroit
Registered User
Whining about Thornton's playoff point totals without having the conviction to say we should have never acquired him or he should have been shipped off years ago is just cowardly. When I say I blame Niemi, McLellan and Nabokov for the Sharks' failure to win a Cup I'm saying we should have punted all three of their sorry asses to the curb as soon as the trend became apparent. A replacement-level goalie would have fared better than Niemi and Nabby in some of those series and some idiot off the street would have done better than McLellan, as Oilers fans are quickly finding out.
We traded a sack of crap for arguably the best player of the 2000-10 decade, one of the greatest players of all time, a top-three passer in NHL history, a great dude off the ice, and have had the opportunity to watch him for almost 15 years. That's something that should be celebrated instead of nitpicking his plus-minus while on the ice against Dave Bolland for four games in 2010. Christ.
We traded a sack of crap for arguably the best player of the 2000-10 decade, one of the greatest players of all time, a top-three passer in NHL history, a great dude off the ice, and have had the opportunity to watch him for almost 15 years. That's something that should be celebrated instead of nitpicking his plus-minus while on the ice against Dave Bolland for four games in 2010. Christ.
Juxtaposer
Outro: Divina Comedia
So you’re basically saying that there are only two positions to take:
1. Joe Thornton bares no responsibility for the Sharks failing to win a Cup.
2. Acquiring Joe Thornton was a bad move.
Talk about the mother of all false dichotomies, good lord. Insanity.
Maladroit
Registered User
No, I never said he bears zero responsibility but it's ultimately just idle complaining if you're not suggesting what the Sharks should have done to prevent that. At least JoeThorntonsRooster has come out and said he thinks the Sharks shouldn't have traded for Thornton and instead tanked for a superstar, as wrongheaded as I believe that to be.
Crazy Joe Divola
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- Jun 20, 2009
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Coming back to HF after week of vacation:
They should have moved on from Thornton a long time ago. I can certainly admit he's had some great years since I felt that way but they should have done it even before the 2016 run.
JoeThorntonsRooster
Don’t say eye test when you mean points
I did not suggest that the Sharks should not have traded for Thornton.
The initial comment was by ON4 who said that acquiring Tavares might have just been a band-aid and a solution of us acquiring a player who wasn’t quite good enough to win as our #1C and top player. He compared this to Dan Boyle and said perhaps even Joe Thornton.
My comment was that Joe Thornton was absolutely at the level of top, elite, cream of the crop superstar #1C in the regular season, but his playoff performance wasn’t at that level. That doesn’t mean that we should have tanked and never traded for him because nobody could predict that a player with such a massive history of elite regular season performances would never snap the trend of his terrible playoff performances.
People use the term vendetta, but I promise you that if I did not know Joe Thornton and I only looked at these statistics, I would be significantly more critical of the player with these statistics. I love Joe Thornton and it pains me to say all of this.
JoeThorntonsRooster
Don’t say eye test when you mean points
Yeah, around 2011, I think it would have been smart to trade him while he still likely had a lot of value around the NHL. After the second WCF loss, when it became obvious that his playoff performances were going to be the norm going forward and he just did not make things happen in the playoffs, it probably would have been a good time to move on.
Maladroit
Registered User
And done what exactly? I can't envision any realistic timeline where the Sharks are closer to a Stanley Cup over the past 12 years if they hadn't traded for Thornton, or in the past whatever number of years if they had dealt him at some point. It would have taken winning back-to-back lotteries to hit on Stamkos and Kane or Tavares and Hall and even then there's no guarantee their fate would have been different from a team like Tampa today. Not every great team is going to get to win a Cup in a 30-team league with insane parity.
Depends on when one would do it but in no way would I say not trade for Thornton. That's simply a trade you don't pass up even if you think the worst of Joe.
Juxtaposer
Outro: Divina Comedia
What are you suggesting I suggest the Sharks should have suggested to Joe Thornton?
I’m not saying that Joe deserves all or even most of the blame for the Sharks not winning a Cup. There is plenty of blame to go around; Joe, the goalies, the coaches, Patrick Marleau, Joe Pavelski, Dan Boyle, Rob Blake, Marc-Eduoard Vlasic, Dany Heatley, injuries, f***ing stancions, own-goals, goals that should have but weren’t disallowed, and the biggest one, plain not being better than the other team. Joe Thornton is without question the greatest thing to ever happen to this organization. The Sharks have been an elite team for most of Joe’s tenure here, mostly because Joe has been here. But how many series have we lost where we were truly the better team? In my memory, there aren’t many. We were clearly worse than the 2010 Hawks, 2011 Canucks, 2012 Blues, and 2016 Penguins. I don’t feel like we can fairly judge the 2017 Sharks (down a healthy Couture and Thornton) or the 2018 Sharks (down Thornton completely), but the Sharks were the away team in both of the series they lost. I feel we were fairly evenly matched with the 2013 Kings (who essentially won because of home ice), and the 2014 Kings outside of goaltending, which was a major part in deciding the series. The 2009 Ducks? Who knows how good they would have been over a full season if healthy. The 2008 Stars? From my (admittedly fuzzy) recollection, the Sharks were basically Thornton, Nabokov, and a bunch of meh that season. The 2007 Wings and 2006 Oilers, perhaps.
At the end of the day, there hasn’t been a single playoff series in my memory (keeping in mind that I started following the Sharks closely in 2008) where Joe dragged the rest of the team through a playoff round. Is it fair to expect that if him? Perhaps not. But one would think that a player as good as Joe Thornton has been through his whole career would be able to do that every once and a while. Even Patrick Marleau, a definitively worse player, had series were he exploded for 5 or 6 goals and felt like practically the only Shark doing anything. I’m talking about Joe Pavelski against Colorado in 2010, Logan Couture against Nashville (and overall) in 2016. Joe played on a line with Patrick Marleau against the 2010 Hawks and had 1 point in four games while Marleau had like 6 goals.
For how good he is, I just think it’s fair to expect him to have been better than he’s been.
- Sep 29, 2016
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You may have missed it but Siemens played 16 mostly excellent games this season. He surely isn't "terrible" and he was one of the best defenders available in the 2011 draft. Only two legit top4 defenders (Brodin, Edmundson) got drafted in 2011. Hamilton has serious defensive issues and that's why keeps on getting shipped. The (now) Oilers Swedes are both useless and so is Ryan Murray, drafted one spot behind Siemens. Everybody else is either useless or comparable with Siemens (towering stay at home 5th/6th defender). With Siemens the Avs drafted an almost 100% NHL player in a draft without elite defense talent. Seems like a good pick to me. The way they handled him was the problem. He obviously was very unlucky with injuries but I never felt like he received too much support from the organization. The Avs defense is a joke and has been for years...yet still last season was the 1st time Siemens finally got his first real chance. An organization is usually prepared to give top prospects every opportunity to succeed in the NHL but that surely wasn't the case for Siemens. The Avs kept on playing ridiculously bad players over him and even picked some more off waivers if needed. Even last season it only took 2,3 bad games after 10 excellent ones for him to get scratched again. I know that they were trying to make the playoffs and stuff but Girard was terrible for months and didn't even get his ice time reduced. I get it...he's their shiny new toy but he really fell off a cliff like never seen before and it didn't seem to be a problem while Siemens' leash was way shorter.
But anyway, Siemens, despite a certain lack of consistency, proved that he can play in the NHL. If he can stay healthy and maybe work on his mobility he surely is gonna be at least as good as the two Murphys, Oleksiak, Beaulieu, Klefblom and Morrow, the defenders drafted behind him in the 2011 1st round.
WTFetus
Marlov
Siemens is a good defenseman while Dougie Hamilton and Klefbom aren't Top-4 D. Only on HF Sharks.
Alwalys
Phu m.
- May 19, 2010
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absolutely not an arguable factor at the time he was traded. joe thornton was literally considered arguably the best player in the league when he was traded for.
there is no possible argument whatsoever to say that trade was one in which we "settled"
to this day thornton is one of the best players ever traded. you cannot argue, ever, that he constitutes us settling, even without taking into account what we paid.
when you take into account that we fleeced boston for him ... yeah. this cannot, in any way, be argued.
- Sep 29, 2016
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Klefblom is top4 in Edmonton but wouldn't be anywhere else except maybe Montreal. Hamilton has offenive upside but is beyond wild defensively. He's never gonna get it. Bruins fans were complaining when Sweeney dealt him...they can be happy now. They got Jake DeBrusk as part of their doubled 1st pick they had thanks to that deal while Hamilton got traded again. Good righty defenders don't get traded twice six years within their NHL careers. Hamilton looks shiny because he's putting up points but he's in fact a pretty bad apple...
OrrNumber4
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- Jul 25, 2002
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This post should be a reference point for any future discussions about this topic.
Nabokov was another example of the star players for the Sharks failing in primetime. However, Thornton must be held to a higher standard. People expected Marleau to play Fedorov to Thornton's Yzerman, but that was an unfair standard for Marleau. Similarly, Boyle was overestimated as a championship-caliber #1 d-man. Even Nabokov's reputation overstated his play....and don't forget that his RS and playoff save percentages were roughly the same.
Thornton, on the other hand, would put up superb regular season play, with numbers to back it up, and then completely collapse in the playoffs. He was constantly the Sharks's best player in the regular season; he constantly failed this standard in the playoffs.
Granted; superstars go through slumps just like every player.
But it isn't the depth players that come through...it is the other superstars. Toews can have a bad game because Kane and Keith were there to step up. Crosby has Malkin. Kopitar has Doughty and Quick. Ovechkin has Kuznetsov and Holtby. Depth players are not irrelevant; they are a car's comfort features while the superstars are the engine. You can drive your car, however miserably, with no functioning navigation or air conditioning. Good luck with driving your car without an engine.
In that way, when Thornton has an excuse. Quite often, the other Sharks's stars didn't show up either (because they weren't good enough, IMO, but I digress). However, that doesn't excuse Thornton having way too many slumps, especially against the top teams in the league. And guess what? Those other players who didn't deliver paid the price. Since 2008, only DW, Joe Thornton, and ME Vlasic are still on the team. Billy Guerin, Milan Michalek, Jonathon Cheechoo, Ryane Clowe, Rob Blake, Dany Heatley, Dan Boyle, and Patrick Marleau are gone. Nabokov and Niemi are gone. From the staff, only DW remains as Thornton has survived two coaches.
Lastly, in the modern NHL, we give coaches to much credit. As we learned in 2014, McLellan was trying to get the Sharks to change what they were going, but they weren't listening. TMac couldn't make Thornton shoot the puck more, drive the net, or play more aggressively. He can only lead the horse to water...
1) It isn't just those four games against Bolland. It's the six games against Stoll, the six games against Niedermayer, the five games against the Sedins and then Lapierriere, the seven games against a broken Mike Richards...plus him getting his back broken against the likes of Kopitar and Getzlaf.
2) Those four playoff games matter a ton...that is where history is made. You take the guy with HOF regular-season numbers, I will take the player with HOF playoff numbers.
In regards to the Thornton trade, it was obviously a tremendous value perspective. However, I think it was a mistake in that the Joe Thornton era is almost over and the Sharks have no cup. By dint of that, if the Sharks hadn't made that trade, maybe they would have been better off. Who knows what happens next that could have triggered the sequence leading to a Cup in SJ? Maybe the Sharks draft Toews in 2006 and that's all they need to win a cup. Maybe after another last-place-finish in 2007, DW gets fired and the Sharks hire a more forward-thinking GM who anticipates the way the league is shifting and assembles a team who is a true contender throughout this decade. Hell, maybe with the butterfly having flapped its wings, Cheechoo avoids injuries and scores 500 goals over his 20-year Shark career.
Alwalys
Phu m.
- May 19, 2010
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the sharks not winning a Cup with Thornton yet has no bearing on whether the trade was "settling" or not. we got a guaranteed first-ballot HOF superstar in his prime. that is not settling, was not settling, and will never be settling. you talk about the butterfly effect, there are FAR more random chance events standing in the way of success in the mental exercise where we don't get thornton. that does not make a valid intellectual case.
you make that trade 10,000 times out of 10,000, and you live with the results. for my money, we've gotten good results. thornton has essentially singlehandedly turned the sharks into a contender going on 13 years. that is massive value for one player.
Comparing 8 successful Stanley Cup campaigns to any number of failed campaigns, including these very players' failed campaigns, is just a little disingenuous, no? Obviously players in successful campaigns will have great numbers. Thornton has good stats in series he wins, surprise.
And these numbers have huge context to them, from offensive depth to defensive performance. How have teams gameplanned to beat the Sharks? By shutting down Thornton and taking their chances with everyone else. How have the Sharks fallen to these teams? It's never about shutting down these centers, Toews, Hossa and a guy named Keith do the defensive heavy lifting while Kane provides the scoring prowess. The Kings we lost Vlasic and Kopitar scored half his points in the games he was out, while we lost our offense because Thornton was redeployed defensively to help. We actually did shut down Sid, but then we had to deal with Malkin and the monster third line with Kessel.
It's no coincidence that the year we finally got the same kind of superlative performance out of Couture's line that we made the finals. Teams paid for concentrating on Thornton and that team probably would have beat any other team in the finals.
For my money Fedorov was better than Yzerman. Yzerman was great but Fedorov was the better all around hockey player. MVP, selke... played part of at least one season as a defenseman. similar point totals but Yzerman padded his first few years in the goalie-less 80's. It's close but if I can pick one it's Fedorov every time.
JoeThorntonsRooster
Don’t say eye test when you mean points
At the time, the trade was certainly not settling. Thornton was obviously the best regular season player available, and it’s not realistic to expect DW to have known that he would bring with him 13 years of playoff performances far below par. Generally, a player who is that talented and that dominant will figure out their playoff woes and begin to perform at their regular season level in the playoffs, given that that player does not decline.
However, with the power of hindsight, perhaps there were better regular season+playoff players available. That’s what I am getting at and that’s what I believe ON4 is getting at. I don’t think anybody knew at the time of the trade that Thornton would end up not being good enough. In theory, the best possible move would have been to trade for him, sign him long term, and then trade him when his value was sky high after 1 or 2 seasons.
I would not agree that we have had good results from the Thornton trade. We made the Conference Finals and won 2 games before Thornton; we only surpassed that feat once with Thornton and Thornton has now been here for practically half of the existence of our franchise. It’s not as if we were some bottom feeder on the verge of relocation that needed to start making the playoffs year after year in order to not be relocated.
Ultimately, we have won 0 Stanley Cups with Thornton, and are probably near the league’s bottom-5 in terms of teams with a chance at a Stanley Cup in the future. If you consider success to be a binary scale of Stanley Cup or bust, then the results of the Joe Thornton trade are an absolute failure. People will attack me for looking at success that way, but can you really blame me? Am I really an idiot for feeling like second place sucks? Do you guys like losing in the playoffs every single year, as Joe Thornton losing his playoff matchup heavily dictates yet another year of playoff woes for us?
It’s not even remotely disingenious to make that comparison. I wouldn’t call it genius, either, because it’s very simple and makes perfect sense. The initial argument was that signing John Tavares in UFA and crowning him the franchise player/#1C would have been settling. Then, it was mentioned that Dan Boyle was settling, and that perhaps Joe Thornton was settling too. My argument was that, in the playoffs, Joe Thornton’s performances have been on par with a player that you settle for; not a franchise player/#1C. These will I compared his playoff performances to the playoff performances in Stanley Cup runs from the kind of franchise player/#1Cs that you do win with. The difference is absolutely massive, and it shows there is a clear difference between Joe Thornton in the playoffs and the kind of franchise player/#1C that you do win with. Thornton has never produced at the same level as the Stanley Cup franchise player/#1Cs produce at, on average, in the years that the Stanley Cup is won.
Thornton’s playoff performances have been roughly comparable to the regular season+playoff performances of guys like Ryan Johansen, Kyle Turris, Brayden Schenn, and Ryan O’Reilly. By no coincidence, these are the kind of guys you do settle for. These guys become available in the trade market to teams who have their core mostly filled out, outside of a franchise #1C, and those team’s GMs pounce on those players. Come this time of year next year, I will be talking about how St. Louis and Nashville lost because those guys were not good enough to be the franchise players and #1 centers on a Stanley Cup winning team, and the statistics will almost certainly back my argument. This will occur because those are the kinds of guys you settle for. Toews, Kopitar, Bergeron, Crosby, Kuznetsov; these guys are the cream of the crop. These are the guys that you don’t settle for. The argument I made is that in the regular season, Thornton is absolutely the cream of the crop; he is superior to all 5 of those centers except for Crosby. But, in the playoffs, he is notably inferior to those 5, and is comparable to the ROR, Brayden Schenn, Kyle Turris, Ryan Johansen crowd. There is one of those players available on the trade market every year for a mediocre combination of futures. Without misquoting @OrrNumber4 here, my understanding is that the initial question is whether John Tavares fits into the Kopitar, Bergeron, Kuznetsov, Crosby, Toews, regular season Thornton category, or the ROR, B. Schenn, Turris, Johansen, playoff Thornton crowd. In my opinion, Tavares is on the lower end of the Toews, Kopitar, Bergeron, Crosby, Kuznetsov crowd, but is aging, has played a lot of hockey and has already declined a bit, and will soon be on his way to the ROR, B. Schenn, Turris, Johansen crowd.
Guys like Toews and Kopitar do the heavy lifting and produce at a significantly better pace than Thornton. We have never deployed Thornton particularly defensively. We have tried playing him with 66.67% OZ starts against, literally, Dave f***ing Bolland. That is the kind of deployment that Kopitar, Toews, and Bergeron never get, and it is generally the kind of matchup that an opposing coach will have nightmares about, and will do everything that they can to prevent. But in the case of that series, Quenneville never strayed away from it because Bolland literally won that matchup, which is downright hilarious.
Couture scored 43% more than Thornton in the playoffs that year. His performance was borderline historic for a post lockout player; only Crosby, Malkin, Kuznetsov, and Briere have done that. If you’re suggesting that Thornton never made it to the SCF because his 2nd line center never scored 30 points and 43% more than him, and that he didn’t win in the SCF because the Penguins were too good, (Ignoring the fact that outside of 5V5 play with Joe Thornton on the ice, the Sharks literally outscored the Penguins in that series!!!) then it is obvious you do not want to hold him accountable for anything. We have had monstrous performances from secondary players before.
Between 2009-2010 and 2016-2017, Thornton has 70 playoff points. In that same time frame, Couture has 69 and Pavelski has 72. This guy is getting out-scored in the playoffs by a guy whose career he supposedly made in Pavelski, and is only one point ahead of a center who is, quite literally, the type of guy you settle for as your franchise player/#1C in Couture. (Couture’s playoff numbers outside of his rookie year completely demolish Thornton’s BTW) What more can you ask of these guys? Are these complimentary players supposed to be scoring significantly more than the Hall of Fame superstar #1C? They’re already ahead of him in playoff scoring!
I just think it’s crazy how much Thornton didn’t have, and how much more teammate support that he needed to win. Yet when you shift things over to a team like LAK, whose 2nd best forwards were Jeff Carter and Justin Williams, suddenly they were just lucky to beat us. Every excuse in the book gets made for Joe Thornton because every fact in the book says he has not been up to par as a Stanley Cup #1C.
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