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The Chicoutimi Cucumber

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Everything posted by The Chicoutimi Cucumber

  1. He won’t win the Selke this year, but these kind of numbers should start to establish his rep as something other than a “pretty good” C who is over-hyped because he plays in Montreal, which is, I believe, how many people think of Slick Nick. He’s taken a step forward this season, it seems. Which is great, because we need him to be elite or near-elite if the rebuild is ever to succeed.
  2. Yah, get rid of the shootout. It was a sop to fans after the lockout, it has nothing to do with the team sport of hockey, and a lot of people around the league don’t like it.
  3. I’m thinking price-point will be the real seller…if you’re looking for a family night out and the kids like hockey, try this instead of the NHL’s wallet-depleting rates.
  4. Funny thing, everyone talks about Monahan’s injury history as a huge asterisk, but very few people seem to raise the same concern about Dach. In fact Dach has been chronically injury-prone thus far in his short career, on a scale worthy of Benoit Brunet. I suspect the reason for this discrepancy is that we all grasp how important Dach is for the rebuild. We don’t want to face the possibility that his career may turn out to be much more compromised than Monahan’s has been. IMHO we need to re-sign Monahan BOTH to give a buffer to Dach when he returns…AND to buy us time to find/develop another solution at C in the event that Dach continues his pattern of disastrous injuries.
  5. I only caught the third, unfortunately, but tend to agree with Galley - the Habs had a boatload of quality “looks” in the third and seemed to miss the net on most of them. 🙄 Neverthless, it was gratifying to get the win. Monty was a beast in the third, OT, and SO. I’m a believer in the kid.
  6. I completely forgot that Tanner Pearson was on the team! LOL
  7. I just wanna say, I haven’t been able to watch the Habs much through the holiday period, so I really appreciate the 10 Thoughts feature. 👍 It imparts a better sense of what watching the game was like than a highlight reel does. Bizarre that Anderson pulled a Wolverine. From the way everyone was talking, I figured he was sure to be another body in the Habs’ overstuffed hospital ward.
  8. I’m neither happy nor unhappy. I assume this is just another one of his temporary hot streaks. If he manages to keep it up, then I will become seriously annoyed, but the odds of that happening are negligible.
  9. Yeah. It would be nice to live in a utopia where we have zero bad contracts, but the reality is HuGo will probably end up accumulating a couple of their own as the team pivots over to actually wanting to compete. Once you’re trying to win, you tend to find yourself in the situation of needing either to retain an important veteran, or acquire an important veteran - and in that context the player has you by the nuts. You accept some pain on the back end of the deal for what you hope will be full value on the front end. I don’t know whether our bad contracts impede our ability to “accelerate” a rebuild. If by that we mean signing Nylander, then probably yes.
  10. Man. It's getting to where we need to acquire FWs purely for the purpose of having enough warm bodies to ice a roster.😬
  11. The SHG rule is interesting (assuming you're representing it accurately). I'm not sure about it. If we want goal-scoring, shouldn't we be encouraging teams to go for broke with the man advantage rather than making them doubly jittery about the risk of SHG? As for the points system, I agree. If memory serves, there was a reluctance to go with a 3-point model because it would artificially shred the "points totals" records of great teams of the past such as the 1977 Habs. I find, however, that nobody really cares anymore about team points totals since the loser point was introduced. All you care about is playoff positioning if you're a strong team, the playoff bar if you're a middling team, and the draft ranking if you're garbage. So, the NHL really should consider this very logical system.
  12. I dunno. It seems to me that we should have a regular thread for the PWHL - with, I assume, a focus on the Montreal team, which is certainly the team I’ll cheer for, to the extent that I cheer for any. I do hope the league does well. I watched the TO-NYR game and was not surprised to find myself quickly seething with resentment of the Toronto squad, LOL. #becausetoronto 😂
  13. Let them suffer. Preferably forever. That organization is nothing more than a boil on the collective arse of Habs fandom.
  14. Totally fair point about expectations. I am just so sick of the Habs never having elite offensive talent…I want CC to be the pure scoring machine he’s at times seemed to be, and the Suze-CC combo to become an iconic pairing. I’m still not convinced this is unrealistic. But maybe it is.
  15. CC’s teammates can’t be the main cause of his limited production this season…he scored at a much higher clip last year, when his teammates were no better. It’s possible that the cause is that he is focusing more on his 200-foot game. He wouldn’t be the first offensively gifted player to see his production drop as coaches lean on him to become a more rounded player. That troubles me, though, because it suggests that his ceiling may be lower than I thought; i.e., instead of becoming a reliable 40-goal man, he settles in as a 25-30 goal guy who is reliable in all zones. Which is nice and all, but not the Cole Caufield I was hoping for. That’s why I really, really hope Commandant is right and that the real cause is after-effects of his shoulder surgery. His shot has not been going in as reliably this season, so that’s a plausible theory. We won’t really know until next season.
  16. I like this post because it shows a concern for the “window” that I think has been too absent in discussions about the rebuild. Part of me thinks that fans are a little too comfortable with being in the rebuild phase…it’s anxiety free, and we live in a perpetual state of pleasant hope for the future. There’s a certain seductiveness to saying “just wait three years,” year after year. But the organization will need to flip the switch from that passively narcotic state sooner or later. Preferably sooner. Suzuki will be 25 next season. Not a kid anymore. We should be looking to make the playoffs next year and developing into a serious contender 1-2 years after that. We have endured the growing pains of our incredible crop of defencemen, presumably with an eye to having them be ready to play serious games on something like that timeline. I’m in no rush to now trade the best of them unless, as you say, we get an absolutely killer return.
  17. Wait…wasn’t Samsonov supposed to be The Saviour in G, part of a brilliant managerial coup that also involved a resurgent Matt Murray? Just like Jack Campbell was The New Carey Price - ? 🤔
  18. It’s a shame that Anderson has had such a disastrous season. I’m pretty sure that Anderson in his usual mode would be sorely tempting to some of these teams IF they could make the cap space work. 🤷‍♂️ A big “if,” I concede. But no one is taking him now.
  19. Ye Habs are improbably hanging in there as a borderline bubble team, but a rental would be completely bananas.
  20. If you’re a contender or wanna-be looking to stabilize your G, you want Allen, but worry about the cap space. If you’re an organization that needs a plausible backup, you maybe want Primeau, but probably aren’t convinced he’s better than some kid you have in your own system 🤷‍♂️
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