Carchidi Wants Blowup

[icehole]

4 minutes ago, King Knut said:

 

I think conventional wisdom around the NHL is exactly the opposite.  

 

if you get lucky enough to pull off a Crosby/Malkin or McDavid or Matthews or Kane type pick, then absolutely you obviously do that, but in all of those instances, the team itself doesn't start to succeed if it hasn't shored up it's Defense.

 

For example, Kane was a big addition to the Hawks, but they won those cups based on what they'd been building with Keith and Toews and Seabrook and Campbell.

 

Maybe the Hawks don't win that first cup without Kane and Sharp, but that team was only in a position to have Kane and Sharp put them over the top because of what they'd already been building for years with the other guys.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I just disagree...and that's OK.  If you replace toews and Kane with 2017 giroux and voracek, the hawks just don't get it done.  Are giroux and voracek schlubs?  Of course not, but they're not superstars either.

[King Knut]

6 minutes ago, icehole said:

I just disagree...and that's OK.  If you replace toews and Kane with 2017 giroux and voracek, the hawks just don't get it done.  Are giroux and voracek schlubs?  Of course not, but they're not superstars either.

 

Maybe not both, but I geuinely think that if you replaced 2007 Kane with 2017 Giroux, the Hawks still win.  

 

[mojo1917]

1 hour ago, icehole said:

Says who?  Obviously you have a thing for defensmen...I do not.

Just all them hockey analysts...

I do have a "thing" for defensemen because if you have good defensemen the forward's jobs become logarithmically easier.

Doughty is on the ice for nearly half the game, in that time he's controlling the play with his passing and skating. If there's a guy like that on your team who is first to dumped in pucks, who sees the whole ice, who has an accurate shot from the point, who can use their skating to erase mistakes and can make an accurate pass to start a rush...everyone else can concentrate on scoring. 

Chicago doesn't win **** without Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook on the ice for 45 minutes a game, the 'hawks have essentially 2 #1 guys on their team and that allows Kane  and at the time Sharp to cherry pick and not give a **** about back-checking. 

 

[King Knut]

22 minutes ago, mojo1917 said:

Just all them hockey analysts...

I do have a "thing" for defensemen because if you have good defensemen the forward's jobs become logarithmically easier.

Doughty is on the ice for nearly half the game, in that time he's controlling the play with his passing and skating. If there's a guy like that on your team who is first to dumped in pucks, who sees the whole ice, who has an accurate shot from the point, who can use their skating to erase mistakes and can make an accurate pass to start a rush...everyone else can concentrate on scoring. 

Chicago doesn't win **** without Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook on the ice for 45 minutes a game, the 'hawks have essentially 2 #1 guys on their team and that allows Kane  and at the time Sharp to cherry pick and not give a **** about back-checking. 

 

 

Improving this team's (Flyers) defense makes their offense better.  The problem is I don't know how long it'll take and if it happens without some better on ice guidance.  

[icehole]

9 minutes ago, mojo1917 said:

Just all them hockey analysts...

I do have a "thing" for defensemen because if you have good defensemen the forward's jobs become logarithmically easier.

Doughty is on the ice for nearly half the game, in that time he's controlling the play with his passing and skating. If there's a guy like that on your team who is first to dumped in pucks, who sees the whole ice, who has an accurate shot from the point, who can use their skating to erase mistakes and can make an accurate pass to start a rush...everyone else can concentrate on scoring. 

Chicago doesn't win **** without Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook on the ice for 45 minutes a game, the 'hawks have essentially 2 #1 guys on their team and that allows Kane  and at the time Sharp to cherry pick and not give a **** about back-checking. 

 

I'm not saying you're wrong but I just disagree.  Some would probably argue that the goalie is the most important position.  He's on the ice 60 minutes and he's the last line of defense.

 

Defense is very important but watching this group of subpar forwards each and every night scoring 0 to 1 goal each night makes me want to focus on offense.  The defense isn't the reason the team is only scoring a goal per game.  Good defensemen would certainly make the team better, but I don't think this team would start scoring 4,5, or 6 goals.

 

There's forwards on this team that have played every game (I think) and are in the single digits for points!  Bellemare has 6 points in 60 games...vandevelde has 11!  Weise has 5 in 48!  Couturier has 17 in 44!  I want to handle that before my defense is shutting down other teams.

[vis]

1 minute ago, mojo1917 said:

logarithmically

never heard this word before, but i am now going to interject it whenever I can (and probably incorrectly).

[flyercanuck]

2 hours ago, icehole said:

Yeah...that's exactly what I said.

 

Ghost gets sheltered minutes against 3rd and 4th liners and still looks terrible defensively. 

 

 Provorov has played against the leagues best, as a 19 year old, and been our best defenceman.

 

 What on earth are you seeing?

[icehole]

28 minutes ago, flyercanuck said:

 

Ghost gets sheltered minutes against 3rd and 4th liners and still looks terrible defensively. 

 

 Provorov has played against the leagues best, as a 19 year old, and been our best defenceman.

 

 What on earth are you seeing?

Read on and maybe you'll know what I see.

[flyerrod]

1 minute ago, icehole said:

Read on and maybe you'll know what I see.

You are just being an icehole..........

Seriously though, I had to re read it a couple of times before it made sense. Stop pairing Ghost with McDud and you will see an improved Ghost. MacDud's automatic back pedal opens up the entire sheet of ice if Ghost even tries to make something happen offensively. It leads to an automatic 2 on 1 against whichever goalie happens to be in net.

[OccamsRazor]

1 hour ago, flyercanuck said:

 

Ghost gets sheltered minutes against 3rd and 4th liners and still looks terrible defensively. 

 

 Provorov has played against the leagues best, as a 19 year old, and been our best defenceman.

 

 What on earth are you seeing?

 

 

He sees dead people....

[AJgoal]

2 hours ago, flyerrod said:

Stop pairing Ghost with McDud and you will see an improved Ghost. MacDud's automatic back pedal opens up the entire sheet of ice if Ghost even tries to make something happen offensively. It leads to an automatic 2 on 1 against whichever goalie happens to be in net.

 

I keep seeing this. MacDonald has typically been paired not with Ghost, but with Provorov - out of 823 5 on 5 minutes, 505 have been with Provorov. In contrast, he's been paired with Ghost for 212 even strength minutes. What Ghost hasn't had is a consistent partner. He's played the most with Manning, but even that's only 248 minutes out of 802.

[Samifan]

The first step for a proper blowup would be to have Carchidi banned from covering hockey or ever writing about the Flyers again!

 

 

 

 

[brelic]

Just gonna leave this here...

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/pattisonave/Alex-Ovechkin-on-Flyers-Ivan-Provorovs-future-I-see-him-as-an-All-Star.html

 

“I see a very skilled defenseman, (a very good) puck mover,” said Ovechkin, whose two assists on Wednesday came while Provorov was on the Flyers’ bench. “Obviously, he’s still young, but he can be a very good defenseman in the league. I see him as an All-Star. Obviously, he has to work hard to get on that level … It’s good for Russia that we still produce very good, solid defensemen.”

[radoran]

1 hour ago, icehole said:

There's forwards on this team that have played every game (I think) and are in the single digits for points!  Bellemare has 6 points in 60 games...vandevelde has 11!  Weise has 5 in 48!  Couturier has 17 in 44!  I want to handle that before my defense is shutting down other teams.

 

If you look around the league, if your 4th line is getting 15-20 points apiece at this point you're above average. And with the cap you need to have relatively cheap guys if you're going to spend big money at higher positions. Could the Flyers do "better" in that area? Sure But that extra 10-15 points isn't making the difference in the season. It's making 4-1 defeats 4-2.

 

Boyd Gordon was supposed to be a means to getting more production. It clearly didn't work out that way. No question Gordon and Weise have been two bust signings for Hextall to this point.

 

They are in desperate need of a top six center. Couturier has clearly not fit the bill and is likely better suited on the 3rd line. He's not a Johansen, but you'd have hoped he could have been a Viktor Rask. Right now, his salary is a little high for that role. But not much. Remains to be seen how it plays out over the term of the contract.

 

Aside from that, with the contracts they have this is pretty much the Flyers as they are going to be for the next few seasons. And, the thing is, Sean Couturier was the epitome of a player that the fanbase desperately wanted on the roster as soon as possible - to keep that whole "won the trades" momentum going among other things. He was the Travis Konecny of his day. Except he wasn't given a top six spot in his first year - he was put into a defense-first mentality at the NHL level. Which is fine, but can limit what your offensive upside is. The team was clearly banking on him being able to throw an offensive switch and that just hasn't materialized.

 

I don't think you've seen their last attempt to try.

 

Defencemen are not just about defense, either. The point has been made with more than a little validity that they can open up the offense by allowing them to create more space while the puck is carried up and or an outlet pass is delivered.

 

Also, as we've seen, it's possible for a solid forecheck to pin a team's good line in their own zone and neutralize them...

 

Defencemen who can handle the puck are all a part of that equation.

[King Knut]

23 hours ago, icehole said:

I'm not saying you're wrong but I just disagree.  Some would probably argue that the goalie is the most important position.  He's on the ice 60 minutes and he's the last line of defense.

 

Defense is very important but watching this group of subpar forwards each and every night scoring 0 to 1 goal each night makes me want to focus on offense.  The defense isn't the reason the team is only scoring a goal per game.  Good defensemen would certainly make the team better, but I don't think this team would start scoring 4,5, or 6 goals.

 

There's forwards on this team that have played every game (I think) and are in the single digits for points!  Bellemare has 6 points in 60 games...vandevelde has 11!  Weise has 5 in 48!  Couturier has 17 in 44!  I want to handle that before my defense is shutting down other teams.

 

We saw earlier in the beginning of the year.  This team was scoring like gangbusters.  Couturier was scoring, Read was scoring, Konecney was scoring in addition to Jake, G and Simmer (admittedly, it took Schenn a while to find his now impressive PP game).  They were among the offensive leaders in the league early on.  Remember that?   It seems imaginary, but it was just a few short months ago.

 

What happened?

 

Well they were scoring like mad men, but they were GETTING SCORED ON like gangbusters too.  The problem was they were trying to play Hak's system and it was working for the offense, but the Defense was regularly getting obliterated.  So they had to give up on the system and start pulling the forwards back into a more conservative defense first system.  That only marginally helped them.  The time of the win streak was actually managed to strike a balance, but even then it wasn't like they were dominating games.  They were all close games.  They just came out on top for a while (for a change).  

 

A better (or at least more well balanced) defense makes the offense better and leads to more goals in two ways:

 

-The first is that when the offense can actually rely on the defense to break up transitions and play positional hockey better, then all three forwards don't have to come all the way back into their own zone several times every shift.  The way things go for this team now, when they break up the other team's possession in their own zone, all three forwards are starting deep in their own zone.  Usually inside both Oposition D men. 

 

That means as the team tries to transition, their passing lanes are already compromised and the forwards are well covered from the start and there's usually at least 2 forwards trying to catch up to the play (which means the other team's center is usually back in defensive position before they're on the attack).

 

This is why you see the Flyers dump and chase so much now.  It's sad.  When they do try to set up a transition based attack or a shooter in the slot, they do fairly well carrying the puck into the zone, but they can't do so cleanly and their passes are always intercepted or at best, tipped and broken up so they're not smooth and the winger is usually waiting for it instead of skating into it.  This is why they can't get clean shots.  This is why their shooting % and goals per game is so dreadfully low.

 

-When the D is balanced, you have a guy like Gudas paired with a guy like Ghost (or a Morin paired with Sanheim hopefully).   When you have two "first passers", you have two guys trying to play the same role and no stay at home type to be more committed to breaking up the play (and usually being more of a physical presence and porch clearing as well).  IMHO this is why the flyers can't reign puck control inside their own dots that well and how so many clean passes come from in front of the net and end up in goals. 

 

Strange as it seems, I firmly believe that more stay at home defensively minded D men (like Morin, Hagg and I believe a Veteran acquisition with some experience and presence to see the transition through) will actually make this team offensively much ore potent.

 

 

[King Knut]

51 minutes ago, radoran said:

 

If you look around the league, if your 4th line is getting 15-20 points apiece at this point you're above average. And with the cap you need to have relatively cheap guys if you're going to spend big money at higher positions. Could the Flyers do "better" in that area? Sure But that extra 10-15 points isn't making the difference in the season. It's making 4-1 defeats 4-2.

 

Boyd Gordon was supposed to be a means to getting more production. It clearly didn't work out that way. No question Gordon and Weise have been two bust signings for Hextall to this point.

 

They are in desperate need of a top six center. Couturier has clearly not fit the bill and is likely better suited on the 3rd line. He's not a Johansen, but you'd have hoped he could have been a Viktor Rask. Right now, his salary is a little high for that role. But not much. Remains to be seen how it plays out over the term of the contract.

 

Aside from that, with the contracts they have this is pretty much the Flyers as they are going to be for the next few seasons. And, the thing is, Sean Couturier was the epitome of a player that the fanbase desperately wanted on the roster as soon as possible - to keep that whole "won the trades" momentum going among other things. He was the Travis Konecny of his day. Except he wasn't given a top six spot in his first year - he was put into a defense-first mentality at the NHL level. Which is fine, but can limit what your offensive upside is. The team was clearly banking on him being able to throw an offensive switch and that just hasn't materialized.

 

I don't think you've seen their last attempt to try.

 

Defencemen are not just about defense, either. The point has been made with more than a little validity that they can open up the offense by allowing them to create more space while the puck is carried up and or an outlet pass is delivered.

 

Also, as we've seen, it's possible for a solid forecheck to pin a team's good line in their own zone and neutralize them...

 

Defencemen who can handle the puck are all a part of that equation.

 

I agree about the 4th line.  

 

I agree about Weise, but only partially and not at all on Gordon.  Neither one was brought in for increased production and they said so at the time.  Even so, we were safe in expecting more points from Weise, who really should be doing better.

 

But Hextall was fairly open at the time that they were brought in to get Giroux off the PP completely and help get Couturier a few fewer PK minutes and have both Giroux and Couturier out of their own zone more and fewer hard minutes shutting down the other guys' best scorers.  

 

They were going to lead to increased production indirectly, not by scoring themselves.  But not even THAT worked.  Gordon was just awful and Weise didn't pan out at all.  Either one should have worked.  It was good theory.   We saw this with the increased scoring at the beginning of the season.  That was really the only glimpse we've actually had of Hakstol's "system" or vision in my opinion.  But they couldn't hold out that way because their defense was just getting abused and scored on even more absurdly than the offense was scoring (and they were one of the top offenses early on).  

 

The D couldn't hold and Weise and Gordon did nothing additional to plug the holes.  So you started seeing Couturier drawing the shut down shifts again and you saw both him and G back behind their own dots constantly where you still see them to this day.  This was never the plan.  

 

I'm not going to get into the Couturier debate again, I know we've gone through it over and over again, but I believe completely that he's got it in him to be a great 2-way 2C.  I think those visions Hextall talked about of a Bergeron type are completely feasible and we've seen it from him.  The problem is that the Flyers can't afford to play him like a 2C.  Right now they don't even have the ability to let Giroux play like a 1C!  

 

They're both having to bail out the defense every damn shift and  instead of having Gordon and Weise shutting down the Bakstroms, Ovies, Crosbies and Malkins, G and Coots are still out there playing both ends of the ice against the best players in th league.   

 

They could bring in a 2C and just play Couturier as a 3C, but I believe that's a waste of whatever it would cost to bring in that 2C.  

 

I've said this a lot lately, but I believe bringing in a veteran shut down D man so you can balance the pairings next season, bringing up Morin, and Hagg and Sanheim as they're ready will be a first step.  By the end of next season, with any luck, I'd expect to see Hak's system actually functional with this team.  Yes.  A 1LW without hands of stone (I love you Raffl, he does everything else well but he has NO TOUCH and is DEFINITIVELY A THIRD LINER) would certainly help.

 

The only question is what kind of shape will Giroux be in at that point and will the likes of Jake, Simmer, Schenn and Couturier be too used to losing for any of it to make a difference?  

[AJgoal]

On 2/24/2017 at 3:51 PM, King Knut said:

I've said this a lot lately, but I believe bringing in a veteran shut down D man so you can balance the pairings next season, bringing up Morin, and Hagg and Sanheim as they're ready will be a first step.  

 

I know you like Bouwmeester for that role, but I still think I'd try to target Hjalmarsson. There are two reasons he could be an attractive option. I've laid out the TVR scenario before, essentially, if Chicago wants to protect TVR in the expansion draft, they need to get one of Keith, Seabrook, or Hjalmarsson off their roster or at the very least get them to waive their NMC to allow Chicago to expose them in the expansion draft. Seabrook is too expensive, and Keith isn't going anywhere, so that leaves Hjalmarsson. The second is that Chicago is yet again up against the cap, with 8 million in space, only 13 players under contract, and Panik needing a new contract. I think you might be able to get a deal done involving a pick swap, maybe something like a second and a "B" prospect for Hjalmarsson and a third. Hjalmarsson has two years left on his deal, meaning it will be up when Provorov needs a new deal. And with 3 cups under his belt, he's the type of guy that can help with the "understand what it takes to win" part of things this team seems to lack.

[flyercanuck]

Wasn't sure where to put this...figured under "Carchidi" works...

 

 

 https://strawpoll.com/eeg1wy4

[hf101]

5 minutes ago, flyercanuck said:

Wasn't sure where to put this...figured under "Carchidi" works...

 

 

 https://strawpoll.com/eeg1wy4

 

 

LOL  -- you know which choice I voted for.   

[flyercanuck]

13 minutes ago, hf101 said:

 

LOL  -- you know which choice I voted for.   

 

Without looking I suspect the "Couturier at long snapper?"

[OccamsRazor]

1 hour ago, flyercanuck said:

 

Without looking I suspect the "Couturier at long snapper?"

 

 

 

You rang.....