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Originally Posted by WCW Nitro
Didn't he draft/ trade for Weegar/Yandle who are important players On D? And drafting Barkov when he was not the consensus #2 pick was huge. And looks like recent draft picks denisenko and knight were good picks too.
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Drafting is a different story for sure, but Weegar was pure luck. He was a 7th round pick who looked like a 'tweener until this year. He took a massive step forward and it happened late in his development. He's 27.
Yandle has been decent value as a point producer, but he's looking like a 2nd/3rd pairing d-man this year and is starting to rapidly decline.
I think Barkov was the easiest decision anyone ever had to make. Anybody would probably have taken him there.
Knight was a good pick but goalies are voodoo and it wasn't without risk picking him that high.
Denisenko is a work in progress. Not sure how he projects long-term.
If you look at the Panthers system beyond the guys who made the team this year, there's almost nothing there.
There's a lot of wasted cap space. They're paying Scott Darling's buyout and also Jason Demers. Luongo's recapture penalty is still on them for another year after this one.
But they'll soon be paying Bobrovsky to back up Knight at a rate of $10 million a year until 2025/26. It's going to destroy this team's cap compliance long-term. Better hope they can trade it to a team desperate for goaltending in the near future.
They also traded Trocheck away for virtually nothing and he's thriving on Carolina, one of their rivals.
You also have the Marchesseault disaster. They chose, actively, to protect Mark Pysyk and Alex Petrovic, rather than protect another forward in Marchesseault. But they also paid Vegas to take him by trading Reilly Smith to them as what they thought would be a cap dump.
I mean, I could go on, but Tallon did a lot of damage to the team in his time. One wonders how many years of the good contracts of Barkov, Huberdeau, and Ekblad were wasted with his blunders.
