Wings should be fun this year. I don’t think they’ll make the playoffs but they’ll be more competitive.
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SUPPORT THE TEAM!
Teams with an .856 save percentage don’t win a lot of games. If Demko plays a bit better they should be fine.
It’s one of the small sample issues early in the season, some good goalies have terrible save percentages that will revert to mean, and vice versa. If your team is getting overrun in shots for vs. shots against then I’d be much more worried than if your team is even or better on shots and is just going through a save percentage “blip”.
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A lot of deadweight on the roster. Nyqvist at 5.5M is bad. Signing Gudbransson to 4x4M is also bad, you can’t tie up that kind of cap space in a replacement level banger.
Panarin had a bad year last year (for him). Lot of fart sniffing, overly fancy plays, and being way too cute.
Looks like a different player with Trocheck as opposed to Strome - he and Strome were constantly overly cute and weak on the puck which led to a lot of turnovers in bad spots.
It’s going to be really hard for Columbus to get a legit number 1 center this year or next year, they have almost 1/3 of the cap tied up in Gaudreau, Laine, and Vorachek. It’s tough going in the cap era if you have no space to pay centers. Hopefully one of Sillnger and Kent Johnson emerges as a top center. Johnson has all the skills but you wonder if Gaudreau and Laine would benefit from having a powerful defensive center to optimize their value. A lot of teams in the league could really benefit from a clone of Patrice Bergeron, and Columbus is one on them.
Panarin was a bit hurt last year and that made him play at 80% to 90% of his best self. And his best self makes a lot of ugly turnovers. Anyway, if someone can’t appreciate Panarin I don’t have a lot of time for their hockey opinions. I love the subtlety of a perfect defensive forward, but c’mon.
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Don’t worry, I don’t have high expectations for Rangers games where they start Halak. I’ll take a point if we can get one.
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Any chance my Sabres are actually good? I assume that isn’t the case, but after years of having “the best prospect pipeline”, I’m starting to get a bit hyped.
I think there is defitnetely some light at the end of the tunnel for Sabres fans. Hard to tell just how good they are just yet though.
I think they are at least one season away from being “actually good” but at least this season they are actually interesting and actually getting better. There’s a lot to love about the Sabres and a good reason to be believe a team with a core of Tage T-Dahlin-Power-Quinn-Cozens and a supporting group including Krebs-Skinner-Mittlestadt-Olofsson has the makings of a contender. As soon as next year, with any reasonable quality of goaltending, they’ll be in the fight for the playoffs. Dahlin-Power in particular is a major advantage for them. No one, not even Colorado with Makar-Byram, has a defensive duo with that much upside. I’m a huge Dahlin fan but I think Owen Power might be the best player in hockey soon outside of McDavid.
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If you’re a Rangers fan and didn’t get aggravated with Panarin and Strome rimming the puck around the boards to each other for 30s as far away from the goalie as they could get just to try a cross ice diagonal that failed and went the other way or got swallowed up at the blueline on their cycle I dunno what to tell you. That happened all year.
Has nothing to do with not appreciating him. He’s pretty great. I can also hold him to a higher standard than that.
They’re probably 2 years away from making some noise, if they make the right skill for will trades it’ll go a long way.
I love hockey and watch a ton of Sabres games, but I’m not really smart enough about the nuts and bolts of the sport and how to build contending teams so it’s always a bit of a mystery to me to see who ends up being good year over year. Outside of the super studs it seems like the margins are thin between good and bad, so I appreciate the perspective of people that understand this stuff.
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Sure, also he makes so much money that he will draw criticism. I get it.
I’m the same way with the lightning, I’m even a new season ticket member and I know fuck all about building a team, lol.
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In the NHL these days the main factor in building a good team is good salary cap management. Teams are not permitted to go over the cap and all but a handful of rebuilding teams use practically their whole cap (within 2 or 3 million). It’s almost a death sentence in the current NHL to have too much of your cap tied up in overpaid players.
For teams that are running their cap reasonably well, the next most important factor is to have good young players that excel in just their 2nd or 3rd year of professional hockey. The league has an “entry level contract” rule that limits the pay of young players that are signing their first NHL contract. So top 10 draft picks that sign at age 18 or 19 and are quality players or all stars swing the fortunes of entire teams.
Making a good hockey team has really become mostly about cap management. All the teams have lots of global scouts and there isn’t a lot of disagreement on which players are good. The luck of the draw in the draft means a lot, but signing players to bad contracts is the main reason teams don’t succeed.
The Bruins always insist on paying a couple of “gritty” veteran scrubs 4-5 million per year to play on the 4th line/3rd defense pairing or ride the pine. It’s probably what’s kept them from winning a cup in the last decade. (Although they almost did it despite the GMs best efforts to sabotage them every year.)