I'd rather get rid of Spezza before any of our tough guys. Everyone forget how great it felt to kick the crap out of Montreal last yr in the first round of the playoffs. Well that would be us, if we didn't have Neil, Smith, Cowen, Kassian & the rest of our players who will drop them to protect teammates. To have a team full of skilled players is the Oilers who end up as lottery team yr after yr & their best players injured all the time because they are taking hard hits from guys because there is no retrobution. Amazing how little Neil is appreciated on here after all he has done for this team & yet so many continue to rave about Spezza who is such a liablity with the puck. What some call creativity, I call very bad puck management regardless of his offensive numbers, he is a very frustrating player to watch.
Do we also forget how Toronto kicked our ass under JM yr after yr because he wanted to ignore that part of the game & Quinn yr after yr fed him his lunch? That's why JM is an assistant now & not a head coach in the NHL. Skill is great but you have to have
a combination of size, toughness & skill on any team to be successful. Players in the NHL are getting bigger not smaller. If all that was necessary was skill every team would have just skill on their roster. And we have some tough teams in our division in Boston & Toronto & Philly & Pitt in our conference what do you propose we do about that, just ignore it? I don't get why so many here want to turn our team into a soft small team of *******.
Pitt could be the most skilled team in our conference & they have some big, tough players not just Crosby & Malkin, same for Boston.