Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
People complaining about the Brouwer and Neal signings might want to go back and look at the UFA markets at the time. When you need a top-six forward, and you don’t have anything coming up in the system to step into that role right away, you either have to trade away draft capital, or go to the UFA market. And the UFA market means overpaying for aging players.
Here are the major UFA deals in the summer of 2016:
https://www.dailyfaceoff.com/news/20...-agent-tracker
Stamkos aside (he never went to market), the only one that looks good in hindsight is Perron. Every other deal - Lucic, Okposo, Eriksson, Ladd, Backes - looks as bad or worse than Brouwer.
Here are the deals from 2018:
https://www.dailyfaceoff.com/news/20...-agent-tracker
Again, other than the players like Carlson who didn’t go to market, I don’t see in any great signings there.
So if people want to say NHL GMs should steer clear of UFAs and rely on drafting and developing, that’s a valid criticism. But there’s no alternate timeline where someone else in Treliving’s shoes in 2016 an 2018 do markedly better in the UFA market. The UFA market is what it is - a place to pick up proven NHLers without giving up anything except for bad contracts. |
There is a world where you just don’t go into the UFA market until you are clearly an elite team and have your young talent locked down longterm. That would have been the approach that I would have preferred. The Flames had to have been a top 15 team in the league, maybe even top 10, in terms of total value of contracts given out to UFA’s over his tenure. Almost none of them (exception being Tanev) were value for the money they were given.
The Flames choose a different approach, signing a decent chunk of your players to short term show me contracts and then having them show them (like good your players almost always do) and then signing them to expensive contracts. Did it with Mangiapane, did it with Dube, did it with Bennett, did it with Tkachuk.