BigRangy
Get well soon oliver
- Mar 17, 2015
- 3,408
- 1,110
Sorry for wall of text
To improve the players on the team, you can improve the bottom of the roster guys or you can imprive the top of the roster guys. Sometimes (very rarely) you can make a simple improvement to the top of the roster. BT did it with Jagr and Hamilton. Usually though, the cost is good players or high draft picks (see: Hall-Larsson, Drouin-Sergachev, etc.) Improving the top of your roster gives you the biggest changes at the highest expense.
The bottom of the roster is usually much simpler to improve. Take your worst guy, and go find a better one. Almost always (for a non-favorite team like the Flames are now) at least one other player in the system can fill the hole left by your worst player. Heck, even a guy on Waivers can sometimes. Doing these small changes still improves your roster but by a smaller margin. However, in a league where the contenders and pretenders differ in ability by 1 or 2 percent, the small changes start to add up.
Opportunities to improve the roster should always be taken because just a small amount can do a lot.
Applying this to the Flames, the top 6 or 7 forwards are all pretty decent hockey players. Yes, an upgrade would be nice, but the assets you'd have to send out to improve the bunch would be cost-prohibitive unless you can catch another GM napping. The bottom 5 or 6 guys are all playing like borderline NHL guys right now and there should be no harm in swapping them out, at least temporarily with guys that are playing well/dominating in lower leagues. Same thing with the defense, although they really seem to have an issue transitioning the puck throughout the unit. That's another discussion.
The Flames top 6 and top 4 are not the ones losing hockey games right now. They've been doig their job and playing the other teams' top 6s and top 4s to roughly even. However, the bottom 6 and bottom 2 have been getting pounded by other teams' depth players and they've also been exploited by opposing coaches when they get their talent on the ice againt the Flames' scrubs.
What the Flames have right now at the bottom of the roster is not working, so why don't they try changing it up with some players that had have success and will probably be part of the future of the franchise. The performance of the bottom of the roster couldn't really be much worse at this point, so what's the harm in trying?
