But you were selling the "upgrade" from Hoffman/Labanc to Gushchin/Musty as one of the reasons we'll be a better team next season. If it's more likely to be a marginal difference then those replacements won't do much to improve the team.
It's perfectly reasonable to like Vanecek more than Blackwood and KK but the point is there isn't much reason to consider these goalies vastly different from each other. Again, not a reason to bank on significant improvement.
Couture is 35 and if he plays again it will be after essentially an 18 month hiatus. In the extremely unlikely event he plays more than 5-10 games for us next season, Couture will definitely not be better than Hertl.
We just traded Hertl, Karlsson, Meier and Burns away without replacing them. You can't replace those players in UFA and it wouldn't make sense to even if possible. We are going to be as bad as we were this season for at least a few more years.
The upgrade aspect is we can't get any worse than what Labanc and Hoffman and even Kunin (whom I like) brought offensively. That's almost 10 million dollars of dead weight. The fact that the absolute worst case scenario is we get the production we already got but for about 9 million dollars cheaper means allocating funds elsewhere (if they choose to go that route).Using Gush and Musty over those three means if the team wanted they could spend 6-8 on someone to compensate financially if they wanted to. We'd still have to overpay for whomever that is, but it's still a massive upgrade from what we got.
The goaltending was not our issue this year so I'm not concerned about that aspect being a weakness.
Couture, man, who knows what happens with him, but I imagine there would be a little more clarity going into next season regarding his long term health than the last minute, constant set back conundrums we dealt with this year. It was hard for Grier to know how to compensate when every day seemed to be a different development with Logan.
No one is saying to replace the elite talents we let go in FA, but there is undoubtedly a bushel of decent enough players available that would be better than having to play Jason MacDonald on the power play. Like I've said many times, if the team doesn't get better next year, it's because Grier didn't want them to, not because he couldn't. And, as I've said before, if we had the season we did and finish dead last and still don't win the lottery, it'll be a hard sell to everyone in the organization to go the same route. What are they gonna try and do, finish even more in last?
