Quote:
Originally Posted by Bingo
Honestly a little more concerned with Andersson than I am Valimaki.
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The old time counting numbers almost favor Valimaki if you consider last year as his second season due to missing an entire season. I'd need to hunt down the advanced numbers to see some more, but it would be interesting to see Anderson's numbers from years 1 & 2 to compare to Valimaki's first two seasons.
I much like a guy like Valimaki getting a shorter term prove yourself contract as opposed to the approach they took with Anderson where they gave him good money and term before he had proven much at the NHL level.
Even with T.J. Brodie, he had an intermediate 2 year deal after his entry contract before he got that longer term deal. So I hope that Valimaki can follow a similar path to Brodie.
I think the Flames have overpaid Anderson, it's not huge or drastic in any way, but I do think that instead of this being a "value" contract, it's always going to be slightly above market type of thing.
But we'll see, this last year was odd especially for younger guys like this who likely had to live alone when they left the rink. So maybe some normalcy will help both of these guys.
It will be interesting to see how the Flames defence works out this year. At this time it would seem that it's not going to produce much of anything offensively. But than again, the 03-04 Flames didn't get much of anything offensively from that group and did okay albeit in a different style of game. I'm a bit skeptical as to how much success a team can have these days without some offensive support from the back end. So guys like Hanafin, Anderson, and Valimaki will all need to step it up on the offensive side in some way shape or form. But I don't think there is enough of an offensive leader in that group to really let the Flames be anything more than a bottom end playoff team that wins games 2-1 but eventually get's choked out by their inability to score.
