Even, as you know i love your takes and we have disagreed on here more than one time but there's no hard feelings. Friendly banter.
"This team was at the top of the standings leading up to the deadline. That wasn’t an accident."
I disagree.
Saginaw/Soo and London had all not made their deadline deals. Cowan missed the start of the season and then him and Bonk missed time during the WJC. The way our team has performed post trade deadline is who we really are. IMO. Hamara was fine, I’ll agree but buried on the 3rd pairing and that wasn't going to move the needle as much as say Beck/.Bloom has for Saginaw or Hayes/Frasca have for the Soo.
As you know i was in the soft sell camp. Selling off Mesar/ Bru and Sop were my suggestions. I think those moves could have landed us some valuable assets to build for the future and honestly i think we may have still ended up 4th in the conference. We did not have the roster/Draft cupboard for this to be a "buy" year.
I do think we could still pull off some magic. Parson's has shown the ability to steal a game and we have enough scoring punch to compete with almost anyone. Can we defend well enough?, that remains to be seen. Losing Martin is a big blow I’ll admit. Not this year’s Martin but healthy Martin, the one we saw against Windsor last year. That player we could really use.
We can both agree that Punnett looks nice in Red/Blue and White unfortunately it's for the wrong club. It's not lost on me how well Osh has performed post deadline.
We can agree to a point. But we were far and away in 1st with a massive goal differential to boot. I get it that the goal differential wasn’t going to last, but we missed players too. The Martin injury and Rehkopf to the WJC.
Had our D stayed as it was post Hamara / Schmidt trades, all we’d have been looking for at the deadline were two or three inexpensive depth moves.
It could be argued that the moves that London and the Soo made merely brought those teams up to the equal of what we were before our defence was decimated. Saginaw was always going to out trade everybody in the conference. That was a given. But there is no reason to think, that had our D been put back in order at the deadline, we couldn’t have been right there with London and the Soo today.
As someone posted, adding Punnett instead of Savard would have made sense but so would have adding Punnett and Savard instead of Sale. But all in all, we could have afforded to trade for all three considering what we paid for Savard / Sale and what Punnett went for. Our D would be in a lot better shape today than it is.
Sure, we were utilizing Hamara on the 3rd pairing which likely triggered the trade request but having him there made our D stronger and to be honest, Reid wasn’t better so Hamara should have been in his spot on the second pairing. With solid top four minutes, and some PP2 minutes, maybe there’s no trade request? Who knows?