Quote:
Originally Posted by GreenLantern2814
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The core skaters represent everyone you’d have out in the last minute of a game to save your season. This is why it’s important to not have an excessive amount of money tied up on the blue line - at most, you’re only ever going to have two D out in any crunch time situation, and they’re going to spend the entire time 45-60 feet away from the cage.
So don’t have an extra $5M or 6M defenseman when you can have an extra $6M forward that you can put within 20 feet of the cage when you absolutely have to have a goal.
Have two higher-priced D, who don’t play with each other, and fill out the rest of the blue line with unspectacular, but functional, role players who know how to get in the way and disrupt an attack. Your #1 has to be able to play 27 minutes a night in the playoffs at MVP levels - he has to be a player with that next gear in the post season.
You have to look at your top two centres and ask yourself if they’re good enough to beat Crosby and Malkin. If the answer is no, you don’t have core centres, and you shouldn’t be married to them.
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The whole thing seems designed to have teams fail to like their core. It's a common trend in posts, but a lot of these analyses strike me as things championship teams would fail until they'd won a championship. Would the Blues have looked good against this list until they won it all?
Anyway, I'll just take this one quoted section and say that it doesn't work for me. The idea that who you would have on the ice with your goalie (even though the other players are "irrelevant" without them) pulled is the best reflection of your core seems silly. If we're talking about building an ideal team then why is it based on an empty net save yourself situation? Also, can you beat Crosby and Malkin in a series without two incredible centres? Montreal just did. And, Pittsburgh have lost a lot of series over the years to teams that had two centres that did a good enough job but weren't necessarily the driving force of their team.
I think building through the middle (goalie, top 2 D, good centres) is a good model, but there are many ways to build teams and still many ways to build championship teams.