The "Tanking" And/Or Other Roster Moves Discussion Thread

Admit the team sucks. Trade away older players who are overrated. Tank? Prosper.
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We don't have many older players nor many older players who are of much value. It's the youngest team in the league, the roster looks like a team that has already gone through a rebuild. Also if you have followed teams that really did sell off all of their older guys (Edmonton and Buffalo about ten years ago) you wouldn't want to emulate that.

And there was a big difference between last night's game and the two before that. Two blowouts vs an evenly played road game against the Blues.

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Jenner Savard maybe Atkinson Foligno have value.

I would happily suck to have the best player in the world on my team for 15-20 years.
Recent Cup Winners “leaders”:
Nobody (Blues)
Ovechkin/Backstrom (1/4OA)
Crosby/Malkin (1/2OA)
Crosby/Malkin (1/2OA)
Kane/Toews (1/3OA)
Doughty/Kopitar (2/should have been 2OA)
Kane/Toews (1/3OA)
Doughty/Kopitar (2/should have been 2OA)
Kane/Toews (1/3OA)
Crosby/Malkin (1/2OA)

Who are our best players? Where were they drafted? PLD and Jones both top5.



We blew a 2 goal lead just like in Philly man.

 

Yeah that's why they have the draft lottery, so that no one happily sucks, so that some teams just get lucky.

And even then how lucky have teams been with tanking? The last ten #1 OA picks, starting with 2010:

Oilers - sucked for the following ten years, one playoff run.
Oilers - ditto.
Oilers - ditto.
Avs - made the playoffs 3 times out of 6, finally won a series last year (6 years after the draft)
Panthers - one playoffs in the five years since, no series wins.
Oilers - okay I'd do it for McDavid.
Leafs - zero series wins, Matthews is seriously overpaid already.
Devils - awful
Sabres - might have turned the corner this year.
Devils - awful.

These are the teams you want to be like?

Jenner and Savard could maybe go as deadline deals if the team is as awful as you think it is. Foligno is worth more to us than any other team.

 

So should we stay in limbo and continue to win a series every 20 years or so? At some point you need to suck for a while and build up your team. Finishing 10-20 every year will never improve your team.

 

They're the youngest team in the league. The best players are kids. They need to let them mature. Did you see St. Louis vs Boston last Spring? Neither team was built by sucking. The Oilers and Sabres were built by sucking.

 

But I’ve been hearing this for 6 years and we have made zero progress. Also show me where you got that information.

 

"The youngest team in the league" is just an excuse for Jarmo's sorry stewardship.

 

Maybe try paying more attention for the next six. They're 4th in the league in wins over the last three years. They just won a playoff series last Spring before their two superstars (both undrafted by the way) walked away, weakening the team for reasons clearly unrelated to draft position.

Sizing up the NHL: 2019-20 NHL teams by age, height, weight...

Here's the graph for non-subscribers.

Here's a graph of average draft position by team. Notice the correlation between draft position and team success? Me neither!

Boston is clearly the top team in the league so far this year, and their best players are:

Pastrnak - 25th OA
Bergeron - 45th OA
Marchand - 71st OA
Krejci - 63rd OA
McAvoy - 14th OA
Rask - 21st OA

Imagine them in 2008 saying "we haven't been drafting high enough, we should just sell off these players".

 

Of last 10 Stanley Cup Champs, 8 were led by a #1OA or 2OA. 6 of the 10 were anchored by a #1 with a 2, 3 or 4.

10/13/15 Hawks...Kane #1/Toews #3
11 Bruins none
12/14 Kings #2 Doughty
16/17 Pens #1 Crosby/#2 Malkin
18 Caps #1 OV/#4 Backstrom
19 Blues none

See any correlation?

 

I see 7 star players drafted top 2. What about the other 33 players drafted in the top 2 over the last couple decades, including our own Rick Nash and Ryan Murray? We just had two undrafted superstars, both of whom were better than either of those two guys. You'd think that if any fanbase would know that not all great players come from the top of the draft, that it would be this one.

 

Average draft position by team based on what? Is this over the life of the franchise, over the past 20 years?

It’s way way way different. Krejci, Marchand, Bergeron, Kessel, Lucic all drafted before 2008. 1990-2008 Boston made the playoffs 13/18 years. The year they won the cup their top4 scorers were under 25.

 

Columbus is not able to GET undrafted superstars and retain them, because nobody at that level wants to play here. Exactly why that level of talent needs to be acquired through the draft.

 

I don't know what your point is. Are you saying that it doesn't count because they drafted some of those guys ten+ years ago? What's the relevance here?

The average draft position graph is average draft position of players on the current team.

 

The point is that the Bruins were already loaded with talent before they drafted any of their core for the Cup, the reason they made the playoffs basically every year.CBJ aren’t even close to that.

what do you think the average draft position is of each teams top 5 scorers? Keep in mind good top5 picks like Crosby/Kane/OV make others around them better.

 

Just have a GM with an eye for talent that isn't high on teams draft lists. That and some luck when mining those gems helps.

 

You played the correlation game. There has been a very strong correlation between Cup winners and top picks in the past decade.

 

This tanking discussion had completely hijacked today's GDT, so I have moved it to a separate thread.

 

Also, while I am here (and I'm putting it in a separate post so I can make it clear that I am taking off my moderator hat for this), I want to reiterate my position on this topic:

**** tanking. **** it. **** hoping for it, **** wishing for it, **** advocacy of it, **** actions in support of it. It is evil. It destroys teams rather than renews them. It is the stuff of which eternal damnation is made. Pursuit of same has been the doom of teams time and time again, and yet folks continue to push for it because they can't tell the difference between correlation and causation. I hate it, I hate everything about it, I hate even the mere mention of it, and I hate any attempt to distract folks from the axiomatic truth of its at best essential worthlessness and at most its continual plunging of developing teams into the abyss.

But if y'all want to discuss such nonsense, feel free. As far as I'm concerned there is no hope for you to ever be right so long as you support it as a concept, but being wrong is not against the rules here.

 

They didn't make the playoffs every year. They missed 4 out of 8 times from 2000 to 2008 (when their entire cup core was acquired) and never won a round. Sound familiar?

Why do you think I posted this list?

Pastrnak - 25th OA
Bergeron - 45th OA
Marchand - 71st OA
Krejci - 63rd OA
McAvoy - 14th OA
Rask - 21st OA


You should be able to guess that the average is low, not even first round on average.

In their cup year it was:

Lucic - 50th OA
Bergeron - 45th OA
Marchand - 71st OA
Krejci - 63rd OA
Chara - 56th OA
Thomas - 217th OA

 

I cant support tanking. I would like to play as many of our youngsters as makes sense to and let the chips fall where they may.

Tanking is squandering your supporters hard earned money. Work harder, study longer, coach better and scout better but intentionally losing is bush league BS...

 

You obviously aren’t getting my point. And I’m not just talking about Boston, not sure what’s do hard to get about that. You choose to talk about Boston because it’s an anomaly rather than any other team led by top5 picks.

they were already good 13/18 seasons making the playoffs and every year they didn’t they fired the coach, because they expected to make the playoffs. Oh well. Agree to disagree I guess.

 

The best part about tanking is it carries the suffering over into the summer when the Jackets get the 4/5OA and then we complain because the strategy didn’t work.

 

Can you explain what the purpose of this line of argument is?

There's 100 top 5 picks in the last 20 years. They're all over the league, on good teams and on bad ones. The fact that the Bruins have been successful without them is an important argument. If you want to list all teams and where they got their top players go ahead, I'd like to do something else with my day. The fact that the reigning Hart Trophy winner was drafted 58th OA should be interesting to you, if you really want to know where great players come from.

 

And then the team won’t even go with the consensus pick and will take some center who spends another year in juniors and everyone suffers for another year.