Vincenzo Arelliti
He Can't Play Center
Because he ostensibly understands how important it is to have competent goaltending - you know, so that regardless of how good the rest of the team is they aren’t being brought down by a single player.
This is important at every level, but incredibly important for the development of your young forwards and defensemen - because confidence is a huge aspect of development.
Next to good coaching, COMPETENT goaltending is a must. Too bad we have neither on the big club, and we can see how drastically those two positions can affect the entire club. Plenty of teams can survive and thrive without great defense (Toronto, Pittsburgh, Colorado), and plenty of teams can survive and thrive without great offense (Wild, Blues of the past, Columbus, NYR, MTL of the past), but to take the next step you have to have at least average goaltending. Above average goaltending can cover for a lot, and then the law of finishing returns seems to set in at anything above above average goaltending. If we can just get competent goaltending and coaching this team should go from where we are now to contenders. Getting over that final hump will be our next goal (and a tough one - see the Boiea of the past). Adding a top offensive talent in this year’s draft would go a long way to pushing us closer to cup favorites at that point, but until we can get that average goaltending and competent coaching, there’s just too much uncertainty as to what team will show up for a game (what we are seeing now).
If anyone of our core gets traded before we see this team win competent goaltending, and given that Patrick freakin Berglund lasted a decade and Carl Gunnarsson lasted nearly half a decade despite being replacement level, I’m going to lose my shit. There are simple answers to our complex problems, and Armstrong had better understand that.
It’s like I tell my math students, often the misunderstanding is incredibly small, like missing a negative sign, but often times the student gets really frustrated and feels like they just aren’t good at math when in reality they are so close. Small misunderstandings can cause huge issues, but are easy to fix with the proper perspective, and those small fixes can have massive positive results.
One last analogy:
There was this swimmer that was attempting to break the record for crossing the English Channel. The day he was set to cross it there was a bunch of news crews to cover the massive undertaking. It was really foggy that day and as he set out he only knew that somewhere out in the fog was his destination, and as long as he kept heading north from France he would eventually run into it. He swam for what felt like days with nothing but a helicopter following him from above filming his journey. He pushed through multiple walls of exhaustion, until finally he became too tired to go on and gave up believing that he just wasn’t ready to complete the journey - how could he know that he hadn’t swam way off course? After being pulled inside the helicopter, the crew asked him why he had given up. When he told them that he just didn’t have enough energy left, the helicopter flew above the fog and he saw that he was less than a mile from the shore.
I feel like this team is the swimmer. We can’t see how close we are to our goal because it’s obscured by the uncertainty - uncertainty caused by poor goaltending and coaching. These small problems could pay huge dividends if only we would fix them. Trading a player like Tarasenko or Pietrangelo, players that are incredibly hard to fill, let alone to line their primes up with the rest of the team’s window would create huge and difficult to solve problems for us. We should fix the problems that are easiest to solve and provide the biggest benefit, and not dig ourselves a hole trying to come out on top of a Tarasenko or Petro trade. There’s so much lower hanging fruit that we could improve upon before we result to such drastic measures.
It’s like I tell my math students, often the misunderstanding is incredibly small, like missing a negative sign, but often times the student gets really frustrated and feels like they just aren’t good at math when in reality they are so close. Small misunderstandings can cause huge issues, but are easy to fix with the proper perspective, and those small fixes can have massive positive results.
One last analogy:
There was this swimmer that was attempting to break the record for crossing the English Channel. The day he was set to cross it there was a bunch of news crews to cover the massive undertaking. It was really foggy that day and as he set out he only knew that somewhere out in the fog was his destination, and as long as he kept heading north from France he would eventually run into it. He swam for what felt like days with nothing but a helicopter following him from above filming his journey. He pushed through multiple walls of exhaustion, until finally he became too tired to go on and gave up believing that he just wasn’t ready to complete the journey - how could he know that he hadn’t swam way off course? After being pulled inside the helicopter, the crew asked him why he had given up. When he told them that he just didn’t have enough energy left, the helicopter flew above the fog and he saw that he was less than a mile from the shore.
I feel like this team is the swimmer. We can’t see how close we are to our goal because it’s obscured by the uncertainty - uncertainty caused by poor goaltending and coaching. These small problems could pay huge dividends if only we would fix them. Trading a player like Tarasenko or Pietrangelo, players that are incredibly hard to fill, let alone to line their primes up with the rest of the team’s window would create huge and difficult to solve problems for us. We should fix the problems that are easiest to solve and provide the biggest benefit, and not dig ourselves a hole trying to come out on top of a Tarasenko or Petro trade. There’s so much lower hanging fruit that we could improve upon before we result to such drastic measures.
