Quote:
Originally Posted by cannon7
Sure you do. You get the benefit on the incline. You arguably get a player's best years (23-27), then you cash in your chips.
If you focus on acquiring futures and you invest in your scouting and development eventually you will have a talent pipeline where you are able to graduate 2-3 players every season. Fast forward 9 years (from an 18 year old to 27) and you now have 18-27 players pushing for NHL roster spots. And they're all 27 years or younger. You now have an amazing problem. You have more players than you can use, so of course, you trade the pending UFAs for futures to replenish the talent pool. If your scouting and development teams have done their jobs, you'll have 2-4 valuable pending UFAs to trade at every trade deadline. And you should trade them, no matter where you are in the standings. The hope for a deep playoff run isn't worth the long term damage to your talent pipeline that losing highly valuable assets for nothing will impose. This is probably the most counter intuitive aspect of this approach, but the math checks out.
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This is where your ideal approach turns into fantasy land for me. The Flames are already one of the best drafting and developing teams. It sounds great on paper but it is basically impossible to have 18-27 guys pushing for roster spots and 2-4 valuable UFAs to trade every deadline.