REALLY? REALLY??!?!
So you're telling me every single successful franchise in this league never traded ANY of their top prospects, and built their entire team through the draft before they won the cup? THAT IS A JOKE, RIGHT?!?!
Prospects are for development, but some are also to be used as trade chips. How can you not see that? Every team does it, yet us Panther fans are ****ING OBSESSED with keeping all of our prospects and just praying and hoping they turn out to be great. Well the big news is that NOT ALL PROSPECTS TURN OUT.
I'll give you the Matthias trade for example. We acquired Shawn Matthias when he was still a prospect for Todd Bertuzzi. Well since that trade, Todd Bertuzzi has gone on to score 67 goals and add nearly 200 points since then. Matthias has scored 25 goals and added 60 points total since entering the NHL. Now I know Bert is old and all that but don't you think those 200 points would've been a little bit more of a contribution than Matthias' 60?
Now don't take this literally and think I'm saying we should trade all of our prospects, because that is incredibly dumb. BUT, we have to consider moving a couple of prospects. When you have an abundance of something, you use that strength to help strengthen up weak parts of your game, such as our terribly slow/old defense or our total lack of scoring.
All the great teams do it, ALL OF THEM.
Take the Kings, a team everyone should be modeling, as they not only won the Cup, but dominated the entire playoffs.
They (patiently as hell) built through the draft, with guys like Kopitar, Doughty, Quick, Brown, Simmonds, Jack Johnson, Voynov, Schenn, etc etc.
A year before they won, they looked GREAT in their first round vs San Jose, but were missing Kopitar to injury I believe. When they traded their blue chips like Schenn and Johnson, they already had a young solid team with home-drafted players. They assessed where they were after that playoff series, realized they had a legitimate shot at the cup, and decided to pull the trigger to put them over the top.
We should NOT trade our prospects at this point. Why would Tallon abandon his whole blueprint now?
He should wait for them to develop, assess what we have, and eventually... make trades/signings that put us over the top.