This place never changes. Many posters have indefensible positions, then get definitively proven incorrect, and proceed to double down on their incoherent, nonsensical stance anyway or shift the goal posts entirely. This eliminates actually interesting conversation/debate.
Example: A few of us were vocal for years that you couldn't construct a team entirely of undersized and/or soft defenseman. Even going a step further, I remember posting a height and weight analysis over the last couple decades that made it pretty damn clear an
extremely undersized Devils' team was gonna be in trouble. Of course you have to take height/weight data with a grain of salt, which I preemptively acknowledged, but the delta was too big to simply ignore. Both of these viewpoints got ripped to shreds by the echo chamber on here. You "didn't understand the NEW NHL. Size doesn't matter." Or, you "wanted giant grenade handlers on the backend", like bleed is somehow still parroting.
Even more hilarious, my posts always proactively said I didn't want pure grenade handlers nor was I advocating for a size requirement entirely independent of skills. Didn't matter. Then comes the extreme strawman arguments, generally by the same handful of posters (
NOT saying Bleed is one of these posters). Then people not involved in the initial discussion jump in by quoting the poster making the ridiculous strawman/incoherent retort instead of addressing the original post.....and the conversation proceeds to naturally go off the rails.
Now let's bring this back to the thread. Ghost and I, who were two early advocates for needing some degree of reach/physicality/crease clearing/strong boardwork on the backend, both gave very high grades to Smith and destroyed Siegenthaler.
