News Article: Waivers, Sunk Costs, and the Pittsburgh Penguins (Roster Mgmt.)

[Ogrezilla]

I'm just upset he's still in our top-six, but whatever. TK was just coming off a pretty strong season when he resigned, most were hoping he'd keep building off of that season, or at least not regress like he has.

at the same time, where would we be without him? TK would be in that spot.

 

[HandshakeLine]

One last point before I get off the soapbox for the evening-- it's also really worth considering that the last 2 CBAs have not been good for players who need time to develop, due to the shortening of the deadlines to a player's UFA. If you're a team in contention, you don't HAVE the option of letting a player put it together in the AHL 4-5 years after they've been drafted like so many past players did. Waiver rules, the salary cap, UFA ages... all of these things can and have affected how players develop in this league. So, there's other factors to consider when we talk about development and lack thereof.

 

[#66]

Part of Malone not being offered a contract was that Hossa was certainly in the plans...the other half was that we knew that he'd get an absurd offer in free agency that we couldn't hope to match.

That contract was universally seen as absurd when it was signed.

Also it's hilarious bringing Talbot up, considering how ****ing awful he was in his final season here. I was always Talbot's biggest fan, but I had no desire to bring him back considering the direction his play had been headed ever since the 2009 Finals...and certainly not at the cost or term it would require.

FWIW he's back to being awful so far this year.


Scuderi was lost because of the cap. We couldn't afford him at the price he got in LA at the time. It's easy to say 'man, I'd love that $3.5 million cap hit' right now...but that just wasn't feasible in 2009-10.

I don't agree with that at all. Once all the injuries happened and he finally got some playing time as the third line center, he wasn't bad and had a pretty good 2nd half.

I'm not talking about Talbot as a 3rd and 4th liner... I'm talking about him being a 3rd wheel with Malkin and Neal. He has enough skill and offensive sense to play with those two and can go out to do the dirty work too. Max, or Feds, was a nice 3rd wheel to play with Malkin but its almost stupid of the Pens to think that both would be the scorers for more than a playoff run.

IMO the Pens lost their ball sac when they let Max go. Maybe he was just a glorified role player but if the Pens needed a bump on any given night he was there to do it. The team misses that now.

 

[Zero Pucks]

at the same time, where would we be without him? TK would be in that spot.

Maybe it would force management and the coaching staff to actually find a better option there; whether it'd be trade, FA, or one of our young assets. I think they've become far too complacent with Dupuis in that spot.

 

[HuskerTornado]

The majority of this board seemed pretty upset when we re-signed Dupuis as well

I remember everyone being pretty happy with his signing, he took a big discount to stay in Pittsburgh.

 

[wgknestrick]

I don't agree with that at all. Once all the injuries happened and he finally got some playing time as the third line center, he wasn't bad and had a pretty good 2nd half.

I'm not talking about Talbot as a 3rd and 4th liner... I'm talking about him being a 3rd wheel with Malkin and Neal. He has enough skill and offensive sense to play with those two and can go out to do the dirty work too. Max, or Feds, was a nice 3rd wheel to play with Malkin but its almost stupid of the Pens to think that both would be the scorers for more than a playoff run.

IMO the Pens lost their ball sac when they let Max go. Maybe he was just a glorified role player but if the Pens needed a bump on any given night he was there to do it. The team misses that not.

I was sad to see Adams signed (retained) in favor of Talbot.

 

[AZPenguins]

I was sad to see Adams signed (retained) in favor of Talbot.

Were you still sad after you saw the silly amount of money Talbot got from Philly?

 

[Tender Rip]

Bottom line: You can fault Shero's decisions however you want. But I think there needs to be some accounting for the fact that trades and other such roster moves cannot and do not happen in a vacuum, no matter what ill-informed yahoos on a messageboard type. And as such, we should consider that more often when discussing moves, otherwise, the discussion is more deeply flawed than it already is.

The article talks about the organizational depth of the Penguins forcing Shero's hand. While I can understand Shero's moves at the time they were being made, those of us who said, many times, that this was what was going to happen with particularly our D-men because of the pipeline overflowing whereas other areas were shallow, should be allowed to say 'told you so'.

We have had a system where we've been developing NHL players out of non-premiere talents from Wilkes Barre who fit the third pairing D and bottom 6 forwards categories. That should have been a strength. It is not an easy thing to do.
When you have a sufficient number of those who the staff deems ready, you should play them and develop them as cheap assets rather than go out and pick up veterans. Richard Park is a good example. He did well for us, mind, but it was an asset picked up for free who would of course yield nothing when we were done with him, and in the mean time he would make it impossible to develop one of our own.

We've known for more than a year that we had NHL ready talent in Strait and Bortuzzo. I have never been one of the many here who slated Lovejoy, and indeed I would be OK with him as a permanent 6th D-man, but obviously not so if we have guys who are better than him. Or at least then those guys should be traded for real value if we want to keep Lovejoy. That's the only issue. Now we see a guy we gave up for a 5th play 18+ minutes a night for the number 2 team in the league. A guy we gave up for nothing plays 20 with the Isles. The reason their values were that low was that we had ourselves created the situation in which they looked tangential NHL'ers.

Tangradi Vitale N. Johnson

This is a better 4th line than what we presently have. IMO. We could have played that from the start of last season, developing our assets to the point that they could move upwards in the lineup or actually be worth something with any one of them rotating with Adams who we would have no doubt kept anyway. But we re-signed Asham and added Park as UFA's, and in the playoffs we scratched the best of the bunch in Vitale, which for... whatever.... reason we have done even this season also.
I totally disagree(d) with this policy to start a regular season when we had the in-house options we did. If you need to add experience to a 4th line in that situation, that's what the deadline is for, but we have stacked the bottom 6 from day 1 for years now, and outside of genuinely elite talent, you just don't develop your prospects in the top6 from day 1.

So, in conclusion, I think the article is worthwhile reading, and the sunken cost argument is fair enough. But it does NOTHING to suggest that we have not shot ourselves in the foot asset management wise in the past years that led up to this predictable situation. And I say predictable, because many here did just that. Predict it. Yahoos or not.