Make the playoffs, yeah, but we just saw the best Flames team in a long while do absolutely nothing in the playoffs, so how do you get better if you lock up this core for a long time? Now part of that answer might be that in a year, Lucic and Monahan are off the books, freeing up about 11 or 12 million, so things look different next year for cap space.
I really don't know. We've seen Johnny single handedly win games for the team, and then with the season literally on the line, he makes no defensive play at all on Draisaitl along the board, he chooses to disengage completely, no hit, no stick, no nothing, and oddly enough, Draisaitly finds McDavid and that's that. It was awful. This is Johnny's best year, defensively. He's come leaps and bounds. And he finishes on such a sour note... makes me sad.
If he walks, yeah the Flames are immediately worse by a lot. I get that. I just don't know what you pay to keep this level of player - the "almost a gamebreaker but not quite" type player. There's lots of these guys in the league. And honestly Tkachuk is another. You want these guys. But you don't want them at any cost.
And Treliving's been pretty good about this in the past. So we'll see how it boils out.
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