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Originally Posted by DiracSpike
Anyways yeah, your Tampa comp is terrible. That was an elite team that had proved it could hack it in the playoffs (ie win a freaking series) up til that point. There was clearly something there. They also didn't have their number one player about to enter free agency. Also they're the strongest NHL dynasty in decades so talk about cherry picking your choice. It's just an all around awful comparison point that doesnt apply to the Flames this year at all.
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I see you missed my point entirely. The point is that a single playoff series is too small a sample size to base franchise-changing decisions on – win or lose. You're the one who thinks the Flames should dump their best player for nothing if they don't go deep this year.
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The "crapshoot 7 game series" canard
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It's not, in fact, a canard, but carry on.
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also doesn't hold for the flames this year. They've made the playoffs 5 times, they've had plenty of looks.
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Who's made the playoffs 5 times? Gaudreau and Backlund? As I pointed out (and you completely ignored), nobody else on the current active roster has been there that long.
In effect, you are basing your judgement of this year's team on a total of 30 games, none played in the last two seasons, some as long as seven years ago – games played, for the most part, by players who aren't even on the team you are professing to judge.
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Most of their series losses weren't particularly close, the ducks twice and the avalanche were robust ass kickings.
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The Ducks in those days were an elite team, and the Flames were supposed to be still deep in a rebuild. Of course those series were ass-kickings. None of that has any application to this year.
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Considering all that plus the quality of opponent the Flames are facing now and would expect to be facing in the second round these have to be wins.
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Nothing ever has to be a win, which is why I brought up Tampa Bay. You don't seem capable of grasping that point.
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We need to have some self-esteem as a fan base,
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There is no ‘we’. This isn't a club with a defined membership – if it were, I would most certainly have been blackballed years ago for non-payment of fees. There is no such thing as self-esteem for a disparate group of people that, collectively, has no self.
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I know we're accustomed to mediocrity from this team but that doesn't mean we have chalk up what would be a huge and justified disappointment to bad bounces or bad luck, good hockey teams like we supposedly have are expected to beat lower teams in series.
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If you mean that you are entitled to blame people for losing a game with an obviously uncertain outcome, you are correct. But you are not entitled to be right in doing so.
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And yeah, we've had some guys move around and the roster has turned over a lot since 2015 but most of our top players have been here for multiple playoff letdowns. Multiple.
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The only letdown, frankly, was 2019. The top players that year, I think you'll agree, were Gaudreau, Monahan, Lindholm, Tkachuk, Backlund, Giordano, Brodie, and Smith. Eight players – only four of whom are on the active roster now. That doesn't count as ‘most’ to me.
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But deeper than that, this year really is a referendum on Gaudreau
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So it's his personal fault if the team doesn't win as many playoff games as you wish? Got it. This is a personal vendetta, then.
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so it's fitting that he's been around for all of it. We're about to get yet another data point on what happens when Gaudreau is your best player.
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And you have already made up your mind about that, as if everything were on that one player and the rest of the roster didn't matter.
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The returns so far are not great. *IF* it happens again, then pretty clearly what you get with johnny as your best player is a team that has bursts, either misses the playoffs or finishes fairly high, but always loses.
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Right. Personal vendetta. If the team doesn't win, it's all Gaudreau's fault, because nobody else on the roster could possibly make any difference. The team with the best #1 player always wins, which is why Connor McDavid has so many Stanley Cup rings he can hardly lift them all.
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It's pretty clear from that point, and especially prescient with him about to become a UFA that the Flames would have to contribute even more of their already stretched cap to,
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You say that as if you thought Gaudreau was overpaid already, and giving him a raise was an obviously stupid idea.
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that if your goal is to actually win a championship it's not in the cards.
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The only rational goal for a winning GM is to build a contender, and when the postseason comes, hope for the best. No amount of planning or roster-building will ever be sufficient to win a championship in a 32-team league with a hard salary cap. It's not as if the other 31 teams were NPCs run by a low-grade AI. They are trying too, and most of them will fail.
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Also I never said blow it up, I said re-tool.
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You said, and I quote verbatim:
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a large scale re-tool like letting Johnny walk and planning on being bad for a few years would be the best course of action
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Losing your best player for nothing and planning to be bad for years is the very definition of blowing it up. Calling that a re-tool, ‘large scale’ or not, is simply a lie.
