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Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Doug Armstrong knows Thomas better than anyone in the NHL. And he didn't pick him for this team (or the 4 Nations). Tells you all you need to know.
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This is a highly political process, first of all, Armstrong doesn't just pick guys. Second, as I explicitly said, they didn't pick him because they're building a team with a certain philosophy. Taking guys like Thomas, Scheifele and Johnston would involve a different philosophy. I thought I explained pretty clearly what I was saying about "there's a different approach available", I'm not sure what you're struggling to follow here.
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Every GM in every country at every level of hockey assigns players roles. They have guys earmarked as checking centres, face-off guys, and penalty-killers.
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Yes, because every GM at every level is building a team for a year-long league where talent is dispersed among a large number of teams, which doesn't allow for all the best guys to be centralized largely on a couple of teams. This is a very different context, and in my opinion warrants a different approach and different thinking.
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Besides Bedard, the guys left off are not great skaters. Horvat, Jarvis, etc have great wheels, they're skilled, and they can forecheck hard and kill penalties. That's why they're on the roster and Scheifele, Thomas, and Johnston aren't.
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Skating is obviously not a "must", or they wouldn't have brought Wilson and Marchand and Stone. Also, Thomas is a better skater than anyone on this roster other than Makar, MacKinnon and McDavid. Horvat should be on the team regardless of approach; as has repeatedly been shown, he IS the type of player who can create a goal at even strength. He can also kill penalties, and that's the point - you don't need to pick one or the other, you're going to have enough guys who can do that anyway. Everyone can forecheck. I don't mind guys being slower as long as there has been some thought put into what they can give you in different situations and how they can outscore the opposition when they, specifically, are on the ice - Stone and Crosby are pretty slow at this point for example but they can create even strength scoring chances because they have chemisty.
I don't want to have this same exact argument again as we had in the selection thread with you just saying the same things over again, it's a waste of time.
