I never really understood the Ujiri rumours. Leaving aside that the Raptors are owned by companies that do roughly 50 billion in revenue a year and could probably match any offer, wasn’t he still under contract? With the possibility of losing Kawhi real regardless, the Raptors ownership that has long fought the…

A well placed rebuttal to my clearly stated position of “No Finnish wingers are good, ever”. 

I think that’s right generally speaking. The only caveat is that if the player is generally open to signing with just whoever makes them the biggest offer then if you get to talk to a lot of teams you can negotiate from a better position. 

He scored 30 on one of the best offensive teams in the league, being extremely sheltered and getting a ridiculous amount of PP time. 5 on 5, he was outscored by Andrew Shaw.

Or a fabulous selection of DIY tools. 

There’s some talk that Winnipeg’s reluctance was really a reflection of Trouba’s interest in only playing for either New York or Detroit. While not letting teams talk to him may have hurt their leverage, if they did let teams talk to Trouba and he told most of them he wouldn’t sign with them at all then Winnipeg would…

I said elsewhere that I understand that the Rangers want a quick rebuild, I’m saying it’s a bad decision but beyond that I think the idea of Trouba as a top pairing guy is at least a little tenuous. His team relative possession numbers are ok but nothing to write home about and before last year he was a 25-30 point a…

Trust me, as a Leafs fan I understand the pressure for a quick rebuild. That’s also how I know it tends not to be a good idea. 

That is all true and a good point. I’m just wondering if you want to be making too many moves that improve the on-ice product and take them further away from the bottom of the draft right now. 

Lots of GMs would love to have him on the team but as a central figure in a rebuild? That’s the point. There’s no direct link between Kakko and Laine, I just thought that because it was Winnipeg doing the deal it was a bit of a coincidence, because Laine looked very much like a stud pre-draft and the results have been…

Sure. But there’s a real question there as to whether or not Laine is going to be the Ovechkin Jr. he was in 17-18 or something closer to what we saw last year. Either way, I wouldn’t want a huge chunk of my rebuild to depend on one guy before he’s in the NHL unless it’s a McDavid/Matthews type of prospect and I’m not…

As bad as the Jets did here, and they did badly, I don’t entirely get it from the Rangers perspective either. Sure, value wise they did pretty good and they didn’t need the #20 pick after making 5 first round picks in the last two drafts but the idea that they’re turning the corner on a rebuild seems crazy before…

Admittedly it’s been a while since I saw A New Hope but I guess I missed the bit where Alec Guinness is partying with babes in bikinis and listening to fancy music? 

How the RFA market breaks down this year is really interesting. If Mitch Marner gets the money he’s looking for, which is rumoured to be around 11 million, it could have a huge impact on the Rantanen deal and the Laine deal and all the way down to guys like Meier. 

This seems like a pretty meaningless hypothetical at this point considering it has absolutely no relation to anything that actually happened but considering he wasn’t a Canadian playing for a Canadian national team I’d have a tough time with thinking of him representing Canada.

The 13 million they have left in cap space probably won’t be enough for Meier + Pavelski, let alone anyone else and I’m not sure I see any obvious cap savings. Braun and Dell, maybe but that’s still not clearing significant room. Maybe Thornton comes back for next to nothing? Either way, there’s going to be some…

If, say, he does it late in a decisive playoff game after hitting a massive homerun to break a tie game? Go nuts?

So I’m a Canadian hockey fan. Canada has the best hockey team in the world. That means when I watch them internationally, I watch a lot of blowout games against overmatched opponents. Earlier in this thread I posted highlights from this year’s World Championships where Canada beat Britain 8-0 and how Canadian players…

So, I don’t want to sound rude but I have talked a lot about this over the last few days so let me just say:

Sure, everyone has different opinions on that but I acknowledged that earlier. The difference is that coming down on one side or the other here has different consequences. Celebrating the way they did clearly was excessive to some people and rubbed them the wrong way. If they’d been a little more muted in their…