Quote:
Originally Posted by Monahammer
You could pull a dallas, not pay money out the nose to try and play a continuance game, suck for 2 years, and then hope Kadri+Huberdeau+ whoever are still at least valuable secondary contributors or good shield players to bring up the youth.
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That's kind of revisionist, though. Dallas only made the playoffs twice in 8 years prior to that "suck for 2 years" and made moves to acquire older guys like Sharp Niemi, and Oduya leading into that 2-year period, and traded for Bishop in 2017 (right in the middle of it). They were absolutely throwing money around trying to be competitive.
Either way, if Wolf is as advertised (and/or Markstrom bounces back) and Huberdeau bounces back to even an average version of himself, top 5 is pretty much out of the question.
This is a team where everything that could go wrong went wrong and we still only missed the playoffs by a point. Do people think this team is actually going to get worse? Even a minor improvement at basically any position puts us back in that conversation, but take away our top center and we maybe pick around 15 again?