True or False? Seattle will have a better roster that DET after expansion draft?

WesNichols14

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Nov 22, 2011
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I don't think so. We will be a little further along in the rebuild, and have a few high end players in prime ages. Seattle will maybe have a more balanced roster, but won't have players like Larkin, Mantha, or Hronek. Plus some believe the league will be more cautious when dealing with them, than they were with Las Vegas.
 
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Mlotek

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I don't think so. We will be a little further along in the rebuild, and have a few high end players in prime ages. Seattle will maybe have a more balanced roster, but won't have players like Larkin, Mantha, or Hronek. Plus some believe the league will be more cautious when dealing with them, than they were with Las Vegas.
True, lets not forget that Florida gifted Vegas a top coach and a pair of top 6 forwards.

Depending where the cap sits, some teams may still be willing to overpay to make some bad contracts dissapear.
 

Hammettf2b

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Jul 9, 2012
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The Vegas expansion was a once in a lifetime situation where all the chips stacked together and made a perfect hand (roster). I don't see that happening again. Wings will have a much better team imo.
 

Lil Sebastian Cossa

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False.

A bunch of teams did a lot of really stupid things in addition to the rules being bent to ensure better roster players were available.

How good does Vegas look if Columbus doesn't hand them 40 goal William Karlsson, Florida doesn't gift them Gallant, Marchessault, and R. Smith? If Minnesota doesn't hand them Tuch and Haula?

Vegas got a buttload of free, amazing assets. Teams aren't going to be giving Seattle "a first, our really bad contract, and a top 6 forward so you don't take prospect X" deals. Hell, one of the few teams that did something right was Detroit by just holding on and letting them take UFA pickup Tomas Nosek and/or leaving Petr Mrazek available.
 

Lil Sebastian Cossa

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True, lets not forget that Florida gifted Vegas a top coach and a pair of top 6 forwards.

Depending where the cap sits, some teams may still be willing to overpay to make some bad contracts dissapear.

Unless it drops precipitously (which seems impossible given that a new contract is going to be signed shortly and those generally go up in value, not down), I don't buy it. Teams saw what happened when they hand Vegas assets by the truckload. They're not going to repeat that again. Particularly not with the last truly disastrous contract season of 2016 being several years in the rearview. Teams, by and large, are getting smarter and more cautious.
 

Gniwder

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So each team can protect 7 forwards and 3 D. Without getting stupid deals like Vegas got, you're looking at a team comprised entirely out of 3rd line forwards and 2nd pair D. Looking at various mock drafts, I think Seattle could pick extra D and trade them to a team like Detroit for some scoring forwards.

Seattle will have better defense, but unless they make deals like Vegas or sell some D-men, they won't have any scorers at all. So it all depends on what Francis does.

On a side note, what's interesting about at the deals Vegas got is that GMGM did all of the negotiating. The guy gets fleeced every TDL (Erat & Tatar) and yet managed to swindle a whole bunch of GMs.
 

deca guard

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i say the owner had a gigantic affect upon the knights success . ive always said the owners most important person in an organization and inthe vegas case they brought in a military mind whom im saying out thought all other owners and built an instant war machine with the proper hires all the way thru organization from nutritionist to trainers to coaches to players to pr and on and on . plus the proper strategy / logic . the other nhl owners got out-owned / owned by a west point military mind .
 

Bench

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People said I was crazy for suggesting Vegas would be better than Detroit *cough* @The Zetterberg Era *cough* so it wouldn't surprise me if a new expansion team had a jumpstart on the Wings. The current climate of expansion drafts leaves a lot of good players I available to make an immediate impact.
 
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The Zetterberg Era

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Nov 8, 2011
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People said I was crazy for suggesting Vegas would be better than Detroit *cough* @The Zetterberg Era *cough* so it wouldn't surprise me if a new expansion team had a jumpstart on the Wings. The current climate of expansion drafts leaves a lot of good players I available to make an immediate impact.

I didn't expect people to give up the assets the way they did. Also a lot of their players really took crazy steps forward Karlsson in particular changes the whole outlook of that team becoming a bonafide top 6 center. For the record I think Francis doesn't get access to that kind of thinking, in terms of dumping assets.

I expect Holland's and Poile's here is who is available pick away strategy to be much more of the norm this time around. The old school guys mostly nailed that, cannot remember if Lou was already on the Island, I think it was still Snow but he would be the notable exception in terms of big time experience. Now maybe it is GMGM not going after the older guys, but it sure looked to me like a strategy. Yzerman did dump Gusev in order to bloodlet a contract. We shall see.

It was also interesting to watch that you could build a far different team than the previous iterations of expansion teams that were among the worst sporting products I had seen. I mean that was certainly a big part of that thought process, listen to Ray Ferraro talk about his Atlanta team and remember most of the retched expansion teams of the 90s. Credit to GMGM, but yeah I wasn't buying a team captained by Deryk Engelland relying on older probably soon to break down MAF (man has he been incredible, I think he might have stamped the HHOF) to be super human. Totally wrong there, Gallant along with Foley, McCrimmon and GMGM have done amazing work. As wrong as I was about how competitive they would be out of the gate, glad I wasn't one of the people trumpeting how stupid it was to go to Vegas in the first place lucky for me I am only in the first they won't be good right away stupid crowd, there are a lot of people in both...
 
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ricky0034

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one thing McPhee did in particular that helped enable a lot of the stupid moves by other teams was his policy that if teams made a deal with Vegas they couldn't talk to other teams

I don't see teams falling for THAT again that's for sure
 
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Bench

3 is a good start
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False.

Nobody expected them to do as good as they did.

But many people did think they had a decent to good team. Definitely better than Detroit at that time.

I absolutely believed they'd be better than Detroit.

But I was still way, way off because I thought they'd be a bubble team at best. At best. So while I love to give @The Zetterberg Era a hard time, my prediction wasn't all that accurate and likely attributed to luck.

I call a lot of shots, I'm bound to hit a handful. I forget most of the ones I got wrong... Most
... (Mrazek franchise goalie, lock him up to 7 years)
 

Oddbob

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Jan 21, 2016
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I think they will have better defence and maybe goaltending. With forwards I think unless they get lucky with a Marchessault or Karlsson than they will be weak up front. If Vegas hadn't gotten that lucky, I think there is a great chance that things turn out differently and they both miss the playoffs and sell off at the deadline that year.
 

Pavels Dog

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Feb 18, 2013
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Everyone thought Vegas had a trash roster after the draft. Even after half the season a lot of people thought they were a fluke that would come down to earth.

Seattle won't have a better roster than us.. on paper. They'll definitely have nowhere near the amount of U25 talent we will have. It's possible they could create a team that's better in short term though, if like Vegas they make some crafty moves and get the right coach.
 
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The Zetterberg Era

Ball Hockey Sucks
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I absolutely believed they'd be better than Detroit.

But I was still way, way off because I thought they'd be a bubble team at best. At best. So while I love to give @The Zetterberg Era a hard time, my prediction wasn't all that accurate and likely attributed to luck.

I call a lot of shots, I'm bound to hit a handful. I forget most of the ones I got wrong... Most
... (Mrazek franchise goalie, lock him up to 7 years)
.

I think mine are Tvrdon and Smith, I believed in them a lot. I also thought Ouellet could make better skating gains and ultimately he never could. Post here long enough and you have a lot of those moments...:laugh:

I have always said I didn't expect Karlsson, Theodore and Schmidt to have that kind of impact. I even really liked Theodore, Schmidt and Miller while agreeing they had a better D-core than the Wings during that off-season. MAF wasn't a model of consistency, I liked him but didn't know if he could handle a huge work load, was actually surprised they didn't get better backup options in the expansion draft too. But I kept looking at their centers and thinking they were going to get caved in. Heck we played them early and that was exactly what we did, was just crushed them down the middle of the ice. Gallant tweaked some things and Karlsson stepped up massively.

It was a breathtaking run though to be sure. I really was just happy to see the reaction of the market as somebody that argued massively in favor of Vegas on the business board. I love the head start they have on the Raiders. I think Vegas is going to be a lot like Nashville and San Jose in terms of this is an ideal market that has lots of dollars and people to support the product. Solid sunshine expansion teams, the ones Canadian media types never want to discuss.

I think Seattle is going to be tougher with all the sporting options. But I think hockey can be successful there. I just think they are going to have to work at it harder, but as a USA Hockey fan getting a team in the Pacific Northwest is incredibly important in my opinion. They had been close with Pittsburgh moving to Portland, but Lemieux saved the day. Still it is an under-served part of the country and has junior infrastructure there already in the WHL. I hope it is successful, I don't think they are going to get the same amount of luck as Vegas and I think teams will have adjusted to the way GMGM exploited them to various degrees. The league wanted the expansion team to be more competitive than previous iterations too, I think that will remain for Seattle, I just think more teams will swallow hard and say alright take whatever you want out of what I didn't protect. Most of the teams that threw multiple assets (think Wild and Ducks in a massive way) got burned. I will say while Florida is usually listed here, they are back pushing towards the cap and didn't want Smith at all anymore. It hasn't been their top 6 that is failing them, those were salary and roster component switches. They should have got more value in my opinion but I don't think it burned them nearly as bad as what happened to Minnesota and Anaheim.
 

Gniwder

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Oct 12, 2009
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. I have always said I didn't expect Karlsson, Theodore and Schmidt to have that kind of impact.
I thought the Caps should have gone 8 skaters instead of 7 and 3, they could have exposed MarJo, Bura, and Eller instead of Schmidt. 2 of those 3 were later traded anyways. Schmidt was easily worth more than any of those 3, and GMGM knew what he was getting, he was the Caps' GM who picked Schmidt.

Season tickets were sold out in a couple of days, I'm sure the team will do just fine. I live and hour north of Seattle, lots of sports fans in the state and we have no backetball team so there's less competition for spectators, except on Sundays of course.
 

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