@MortiestOfMortys just curious, what would you consider "gutting" the prospect pool? Obviously, you mean not trading the likes of Thomas, Kyrou, Kostin, Thompson before we know what we have, but what would be your opinion of using guys like Foley, Blais, Stevens, Walman for upgrades?
Personally, I don't think any of them hold enough value to warrant using them in a realistic trade (using one of them + a 1st) so I don't think it would be worth moving them. I think that's why Thompson's name gets brought up a lot because he's at the tail end of that tier of guys that hold enough value to make a "splash."
My opinion on those guys is that no amount of depth is enough until you have more than enough. And then add more anyways.
I look at Boston, and I look at Winnipeg, and I see teams who were patient through years of suckiness while their prospects developed. That patience is paying off incredibly well right now for each of them. Not only are they both in the playoffs, they’ve got pretty good chances of going a ways in on the backs of those very guys they waited on. And not only that, but Providence and Manitoba are both super good AHL squads with a ton of quality prospects doing good work.
That’s what I want for our team. I want to be able to make an easy decision to trade prospects because we have 5 other guys pushing for time. I don’t want to have to argue about who is the most tradeable of our 4 good prospects, because we actually have like 8-9 of those guys on their way through.
That may very well be the case right now(!), between Thompson, Sanford, Foley, Blais, Musil, Stevens, Kyrou, Walman, Schmaltz, Poganski, Mikkola, Kaspick, Kostin, &c, but we just don’t know yet. We don’t have a good gauge on how any of them can actually play at the pro level. Between our uncertain AHL affiliation situation this year, injuries, and just general bad luck, we have no idea what we’ve got in these guys. They’ve never played on the same team together. Some have been injured for substantial amounts of time. Some were relegated to bottom-6 duty all year, getting only a few minutes a night. Some were in their first years as a pro, and with all of the other aforementioned factors, had a steep, steep learning curve and very little safety cushioning.
My opinion is that there isn’t a top-6 forward that is available in the league right now that is a sure enough bet long-term to dip into that pool for before we even know what it looks like. We expended tremendous resources getting to this spot, even for the role players, to sacrifice the years of control we have over them for a high-scoring vet who might only stick around for a year and refuse to be dealt at the deadline for anything substantial (a la Shattenkirk). You could argue that the only reason why people are so comfortable with moving on from Tage Thompson before we really know what he’s capable of (he’s 20 for chrissakes), is because we do have that depth. I just don’t see the point in throwing away that depth when there are teams out there thriving off of the depth they chose not to move on from.
If we move Tage and a 1st, that counts as two first round picks. Teams don’t build by moving 4 first rounders in 2 years. That’s the kind of thing that teams like Pittsburgh do to extend their window, because they have a collection of the best forwards in the world who have won multiple championships, terrific scouting to find guys like Guentzel and Sprong, and a good enough reputation to add beyond the draft for free with guys like Aston-Reese.
I want to get to the point where we can move Handzus, Nagy, a first, and our first round pick from a few years ago for a true top-line, world-class, team-changing forward, and not really get worse or feel the impacts of that trade because we are so deep and so good at drafting and asset management that we have a real, tangible surplus of assets. We are nowhere near close to that point right now. Behaving like we are is foolish.
When Army didn’t re-sign Brouwer and Backes, he committed to a rebuild, plain and simple. The Shatty and Stastny deadline deals solidified that course of action. Reversing course now because the fans are pissed that we missed the playoffs betrays that commitment, and sets us back substantially. One of the reasons why the Jarmo/Davidson rebuild didn’t work is because they didn’t let us suck for long enough, and got antsy to make things happen before it was really time to. And so we sat out some of the best drafts in a generation chasing a futile dream. If we haven’t learned the lesson from that, maybe we deserve to suck forever.
TL;DR Don’t get rid of our depth before we know what we’ve got, we’ve done it before and it hasn’t worked out.
