You may want to check to see when Kucherov signed. He missed the entire preseason and a few regular season games in that stalemate. Yzerman also got into a stalemate with Drouin which resulted in him sitting out a large portion of a season, which hampered his trade value.
How can you sit there and say I'm being ignorant for saying he could never win with you after you said this: "Should be interesting to see how long it takes you guys to catch up to me and see this guy for the fraud he is". And the fact that the minute he was hired you hoped you were wrong about him SHOWS you had your mind made up on him from the outset. That's strong language from someone trying to give off the impression of impartiality.
It takes two people to sign a contract. If Willy doesn't want to sign for a bargain bin price, Willy's not going to sign for a bargain bin price. It's as simple as that. Dubas did everything to bring the value down except put a gun to his head, and Willy still waited until 5 minutes before the deadline. I don't get how that's Dubas' fault, or Dubas not showing any stones. Not showing stones would have been giving Willy what he wanted in the late summertime or through the first quarter of the season, but then we'd be paying Willy $7.5-$8.0m per year, and you'd be on here lamenting about how Dubas blinked and gave up too much. Dubas was never going to win with you unless he signed Willy to some sort of non-sensical fantasy land version of a contract that has no basis in reality. This is what's called setting someone up to fail.
What would you have done differently, aside from simplistically saying "I would have signed him earlier" or "I would have signed him cheaper"? I have to laugh at the gall.
Rielly was less established as a player than Nylander was when he signed. Rielly had never crossed the 40-point mark in a season, never shown a lot of powerplay prowess, struggled with top-end competition, had never even played in a playoff game, and we didn't really know what he was going to be at the time. Kadri was coming off a down season with off-ice issues. Lou leveraged the uncertainty in both cases into long-term bargains. It was a smart move, but there was no doing that with a 21-year old with two 60-point seasons to his name. Those players are rare, if you didn't know.
Stop crying about a 35-year-old backup goaltender with a 0.914 save percentage this season. Sparks' 0.907 save percentage means he lets in one more goal every 4-5 games. It's a small difference, and with small sample sizes all it takes is a shutout from Sparks or a god-awful game from McElhinney to narrow that gap even more.
You absolutely do have a dog in this fight, because anyone who has followed what you've said on here since the day you signed up knows being proven smarter than anyone else is all that matters to you.
