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JR Ewing

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JR Ewing last won the day on February 21

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About JR Ewing

  • Birthday 05/01/1973

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    Victoria
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    Oilers
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  1. Arizona? The league has bent over backwards to keep that sorry franchise where they are, to the extent that they're now playing in a tiny college arena where the fans of opposing teams outnumber people cheering for the Coyotes. The team is almost literally just a dumping grounds for LTIR contracts.
  2. The term is nearly laughably over-used now. Generational talents are the sorts of players who start racking up numbers that nobody has seen in (gasp!) a generation or more. They're the sorts of players who pile up multiple Art Ross, Hart, Lindsays, etc. Patrick Kane has won a Hart, Lindsay and Art Ross and was, as you point out, a sub-par defensive player. Great player who had a great year, but it doesn't add up to Crosby, who has two Art Ross, two Harts and three Lindsays. It's light years away from McDavid who has five Art Ross, four Lindays and three Harts in only eight years. Patrick Kane is a slam-dunk, first ballot of Hall of Famer. Not generational, though.
  3. If anything, the Oilers winning the lottery in 2015 is evidence that the league doesn't rig the draft. There's no way they were hoping that Connor McDavid would land in the laps of a historically inept management team that plays its games in the most out-of-the-way market they could find. If they had their choice, McDavid would be a Ranger or Blackhawk right now.
  4. Frost has average NHL size for a centre, but I do take your point. A player can be small and effective, but small teams are easier to neutralize and you can't teach size...
  5. Agreed. I think that drafting best player available is damned near always the way to go, with exceptions for things like prioritizing centres over wingers or players who are almost a year younger than the rest of the group. Drafting for current need is risky business. Players take time to develop, and your needs may be very different by the time they're ready, and that's if they even make it that far anyway. I don't know who of those three will end up the better player, but I wouldn't let Catton being relatively thin dissuade me if I was pretty sure that he was the best bet.
  6. No, I'm sorry. He's well past his expiration date and providing sub-replacement level play at both ends of the ice, especially his own.
  7. Yup. Three more of my fairly meaningless rules: -Drafting Coke machines (huge, unskilled players) in anything other than the late rounds is a recipe for disaster. -Using early picks based on a player's supposed character, without scoring numbers to back it up, is a bad idea. -Drafting defensive specialists is usually bound to blow up in your face.
  8. Even if you do everything right, you could come up against a team with a payroll approaching $100M in a league with a salary cap of $85M and get to listen to the analysts wax poetic about that team's incredible depth.
  9. Tanking can assure you of getting high quality picks, but a lot of things have to line up properly for it all to work. You need to do it when the right player comes along. The term "generational talent" gets thrown around a lot these days. Sometimes it's used correctly, like with Crosby and McDavid and sometimes it doesn't, like with Bedard. You can still build around a player like Bedard, but I'm not entirely convinced that you should strip your organization completely of talent to get a player who falls short of that truly rare gift. The textbook example of this are the Oilers. In their case, they tried it with Taylor Hall, and he just wasn't the guy to empty to the cupboard for. Ryan Nugent-Hopkins is a very good hockey player, but his draft wasn't the deepest. Nail Yakupov was a disaster. Not all 1st overall picks, not even consensus #1s, are that guy. It's one thing to shred talent, but it's another to build it back up. Sure, you can stockpile draft picks, but those picks need to be the right players with the right mix of qualities and at the right positions. You need the right people in player development. You need the right people in the AHL. You need an owner who keeps his nose out of hockey ops. You can't make mistakes there, or you wander in the wilderness. You can't have bad luck. In 2019, the Oilers had Andrej Sekera carved out of their rebuild, due to an Achilles injury which ended his NHL career. The next season, Oscar Klefbom was forced to retire due to arthritis issues at only 26. Adam Larsson signed in Seattle the next off-season, because he couldn't bear to play hockey in the building next to the place where his father died. Total rebuilds can work, but a lot factors (many of which are completely beyond your control) have to swing in your favour in order for it to go right.
  10. Agreed. Kelly McCrimmon is the smartest, craftiest, most creative and devious General Manager currently at work in the NHL, and he had a strong deadline.
  11. EJ is a replacement-level player now: He costs $3.3M but is providing $800K in value.
  12. Here's why I can't help but be a little cynical about Stone being put on LTIR: Man, it is so lucky that Stone's back always gives up the ghost just before the trade deadline, so the team can add a bunch of salary to their roster. How convenient.
  13. What's been galling is to see a guy the size of Matthews basically disappear when things get physical. Steve Stamkos, outweighed by 20 lbs, bullied Matthews a couple of playoffs ago.
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