Quote:
Originally Posted by Classic_Sniper
Lastly, yeah Gaudreau has his problems, like all the players on this team, he has faults. But the biggest problem the Flames have virtually every year is goal scoring. Taking away your most dynamic offensive player will only hurt this team’s chances to win. So if you’d like to see the Flames score 1 goal every night while trying to win 1-0 or 2-1, then by all means, trade Gaudreau. But this team will flat be one of, if not the most boring bubble playoff team in the league.
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While I agree with your overall point about Gaudreau,
we're already one of the most boring bubble playoff teams in the league.
I'm going to repeat a couple of points I made in the Treliving thread:
This is the Treliving era in regular season points:
2014 77 points
2015 97 points
2016 77 points
2017 94 points
2018 84 points
2019 107 points
2020 on pace for 92 points
2021 on pace for 52-53 points (equivalent of 77 points in an 82 game season).
That's a 90 point team on average for the last four seasons, and that includes 2019 which is looking more and more like an anomaly. We're playing defense first hockey, and while Gaudreau might have drawn interest in his first seasons, no one is talking about him anymore.
We suck, we're boring, we have no cap space despite most of our top players being on their RFA contracts, we have one of the worst prospect pools in the league, we're probably not going to draft high and we don't have extra draft picks, and we have no superstar players to retool around.
Sure, Darryl Sutter can probably get more out of this team given more time, but I just don't think there's enough blood in this stone no matter how hard you squeeze.
I don't see a way up from here, we need to go down and try again.
This means getting those damned draft picks and not trading them away like Treliving keeps doing.
(Between 2014 and 2020, if you sum up all draft picks, the Flames have had
Two less 1st round picks than expected, two less 3rd round picks, one extra 4th round pick, and two less 5th round picks. Just looking at what the team was doing, an outsider probably couldn't even tell we had a rebuild.)
Now, the Flames organization are probably not going to do it because they're stubborn, fall too much in love with their players, and just love being mediocre, but to me this starts with trading Gaudreau. He's the guy that can bring in those sweet 2022-23 1st rounders, and at 27 with one more year on his very reasonable contract, even in the flat cap world, he's at about peak value.
Sure he might put up 100 points somewhere else, but he's not going to do it here anyway. Even if he stays, we don't have the support coming in for that kind of a season.
Let's not be Columbus. Hooray they swept Tampa because they didn't trade away their stars like Panarin with expiring contracts, but that was the sum total of their playoff success, while Tampa came back next season and won another cup. Now Columbus sucks again. (But at least they have three 1st rounders in the next draft, unlike us.)