Quote:
Originally Posted by Erick Estrada
It's pretty obvious the Hurricanes (Dudley/Waddell) don't feel Lindholm is worth the money he was expecting on his next contract which was why he was put up for offers. I expect with Hanifin they were probably staring at paying him similar money to Hamilton so why not get the better player in Hamilton if you are going to pay $5+ million anyway? I doubt ether player was a problem but the Hurricanes didn't see them as core players moving forward and feel they got the best player in Hamilton and maybe another core piece with Fox as well as a nice complementary winger in Ferland. Easy to see why they would make this trade if they weren't sold on Lindholm. Flames fans painting Hamilton as a problem or saying he's terrible defensively are doing the typical Canadian fan bashing players on the way out so none of this is surprising especially seeing how many fans willfully jumped on the Eric Francis article bandwagon that guys like Monahan, Gaudreau, Hamilton, etc were okay with losing.
I feel this is a trade that can work for both teams as if Hanifin can maintain 40 point pace and Lindholm improve on last season and become a 50 point player the Flames should be better or at the very least no worse. Hamilton will be put in a situation in Carolina where he's going to probably put up close to career numbers and if Ferland can get more consistency he could be a nice surprise for them. Fox is probably the X factor as if he becomes a star then the trade probably doesn't look as good but I imagine he was never going to play for the Flames so his value in a trade would diminish as the Flames got closer to losing him for nothing.
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The bolded is the part that trips me up with this deal. I agree with you that they need to be better for us to be even or marginally improved for this season. Consequently, your argument is basically that we got more expensive as a result of this trade, but not necessarily better. And some people wonder why the sentiment surrounding the trade is what it is.
The big question for me with Lindholm is where he plays, and with whom. If he's willing to play RW, then he's basically Gaudreau and Monahan's wingman by default. And with those two, he could probably put up a lot of points. But if he (and/or Peters) insists that he's a C, then what? You pretty much have to play him with Tkachuk or he's going to be trying to drag players around the ice. And in that case, we've only made our weakness at RW worse.
July 1 is going to be quite interesting, as we're going to have to overpay to deal with the mess at RW that Treliving has completely failed to address to this point, despite spending heavy coin to add players to areas of strength.