[Jay Random]

Originally Posted by cannon7

If by worse you mean lean hard into developing talent, then yes.

But you have already stated that you want to get rid of that talent as soon as it turns 27. So you're developing it for other teams, and you are always guaranteed to lose on the ice.

Yes. But in the 1990's there was no salary cap, there was no relief for a weak Canadian dollar and the Flames' track record in drafting and developing talent was something of a sad joke. This is the forum that turned Rico Fata into a meme.

So why do you want to do the same thing voluntarily?

But even then there are cases where this strategy I am proposing worked. Nieuwendyk in his prime got us Iginla. Fleury in his prime got us Regehr.

Yes, and you would have got rid of them both at age 27.

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.

You are focused entirely on offence, and too much on averages. Players' highest-scoring years are not necessarily their best years overall; and the best talents tend to have longer primes than other players.

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.

That's actually pretty normal, whether you are focused on futures or not.

Fast forward 9 years (from an 18 year old to 27) and you now have 18-27 players pushing for NHL roster spots.

No you don't, because most of them have already graduated to fill the holes you left by cashiering everyone who turned 27.

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.

No, you don't have more players than you can use. The median between 18 and 27 is 22.5, which is under the maximum size of an NHL roster.

You just have a roster of young players who have all learned to lose together.

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 all you'll get for them is more futures, to continue the cycle of never winning.

And you should trade them, no matter where you are in the standings.

In other words, every time your team is in danger of becoming good, you should get rid of your top players so you can continue losing.

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.

In your books, deep playoff runs aren't worth anything. In fact, the plan you propose would keep your team out of the playoffs most years, and if you did by sheer luck make the dance, the inexperience of your roster would make them an easy out.

This is probably the most counter intuitive aspect of this approach, but the math checks out.

Hockey isn't a math problem, and neither is the entertainment business. You haven't explained why fans would buy tickets to watch you lose year after year after year.

But to address your concern regarding winning. Most teams are cobbled together. Some drafted players, some free agent signings, some acquired through trade, etc.

Yes, that's because teams don't develop talent evenly at all positions. Trades and FA signings are a way to improve positions of weakness. Now you want to take even that away.

But with the approach above, the entire roster will effectively be developed together.

No they won't, because every year three of the best and most seasoned players will be sold for picks.

Players will know each other from the day they are drafted to the day they are traded as pending UFAs.

The two or three guys drafted in the same year will. So what?

They will have up to 9 years to develop chemistry as opposed to the 1-2 year average most players in the NHL get.

Most NHL teams keep their core players a lot longer than 1-2 years. Guess what? Most NHL teams keep their core players past age 27, which is exactly when you want to get rid of them. Players have a shorter time together when you arbitrarily sell them off at a certain age.

As such, again as long as scouting/development does its thing, you'll be able to maximize the team dynamic, which will result in better team performance, which leads to more wins.

No it doesn't, because you keep selling off talent just as it's getting mature enough to win anything.

The catch is that if the scouting/development teams fail in identifying and developing talent then there will be lean years where wins are hard to come by. But that is not much different from the antiquated methods hockey teams are managed today.

The only way your system is even possible is if most of the other teams are managed by those ‘antiquated methods’ so you can take advantage of them.

As opposed to spending to the cap and still being in sixth place in your division?

Half the teams in the NHL spend over the cap. Spending to the cap is simply the minimum price of even trying to compete.

But I suppose that's all right, because your plan is set up to make sure a team never becomes competitive. I guess spending 80% of the cap instead of 100% is meant to make up for some of the huge financial losses because nobody wants to see your crappy product.

Here, by the way, is another number for you: If you are graduating an average of 2.5 players per season, and dumping them all 9 years after being drafted, then you need those players to start graduating at age 18 to fill a roster. You need the whole 9 years from each and every one of them. That means nobody worth keeping stays in junior or college, nobody plays in the AHL, and every year you have four to six teenagers who really aren't ready for the NHL being pushed into jobs too soon.

If you are even a wee bit realistic, and suppose that your players on average won't be NHL-ready until age 21, you need to graduate FOUR players every year to fill a roster. And since you don't want to ‘cobble together’ anything with trades or signings, you had better hope and pray that each year's crop miraculously fills exactly the same positions as the players you dumped for futures the previous season.

The whole idea is altogether too silly for words. There's a reason why nobody does business this way, and it is not ‘antiquated methods’. It's because the purpose of an NHL team is not to develop talent, but to win hockey games and entertain paying customers.