Quote:
Originally Posted by Textcritic
There is a HUGE difference between trading for a currently younger backup goalie with some upside, and trading for an established goalie like Elliott or Hiller. If Treiving could somehow pull in a goalie like Grubauer or sign Darling I would say this represents an opportunity for the team to grow with a potential starter in the long term. The key is for scouts to do their homework and to pursue a solid, underutilised goalie—the fact that the Flames have been in on trade rumours in the past for Matt Murray, Martin Jones, and Cam Talbot strongly suggests that they have a good handle on identifying this sort of player.
|
We already have the potential to grow a potential starter. His name is Jon Gillies. He's 23 and could be brought along playing 15-25 games behind Ben Bishop.
The idea is you start him off at 15-20 games in his first season and gradually get to a point where Bishop and Gillies are splitting the net.
St. Louis did the exact same thing with Elliot/Allen. Now St. Louis has a 26 year old solid #1 goalie with a $4.350m cap hit.
Calgary will never be capable of developing their own goalie if they aren't going to give the kids they draft the opportunity to succeed. Gillies is already 23 years old so he's not an inexperienced teenager.
It would be silly to give away any reasonable asset to acquire a goalie that lit it up for 15-20 games in front of a team that is substantially better than Calgary.
We are 1 for 2 in trading for secondary goalies. Worked with Kiprusoff and was a horrible failure with Ramo. Kipper wasn't even a solid #1 and we ended up losing the best defensive dman in the league in Vlasic. Kipper would have one good year followed by a season where he was bottom 5 amongst starters in save percentage.
Fact is you rarely see a team's #1 goalie come up and get traded because it's more difficult to develop that elite #1 goalie than any other position. I don't want a guy that just gets by as a #1.
If we want to win a Stanley cup we need a Top 5 goalie that is capable of winning the vezina and conn smythe.
A goalie that your team completely trusts to keep the puck out the net affording them the ability to take risks and score more goals so we can win more games.
You aren't going to get that in Scott Darling. If Scott Darling was that goalie Chicago would be shipping Crawford out. The only goalie recently to be traded that has the potential to win it is Cam Talbot. Martin Jones and Robin Lehner both have glaring weak spots that are going to get worse when they shrink the equipment.
So long as we can get Bishop at 6M or less it's a safe move. Best case scenario Gillies grows into that #1 and starts to out play Bishop in 2-3 years. IF you retain 2-3 million on Bishop you'd have interest from half the league.
So as I said. There is no down side to signing Bishop. It's really an open and shut discussion.