Time to face reality a blow this team up now

[The Chicoutimi Cucumber]

28 minutes ago, Commandant said:

I think, best case scenario, there are 2 seasons of suck before this turns.

Im writing off 2018-19.

 

2019-20 is kotka and poehling as rookies if we are lucky. And i dont see two rookie cs leading the way to contention. It will be a development year.

 

So 2020-21 is our realistic goal.

Build assets until then.

 

I can see the FW unit being pretty good if and when those two emerge as major players.  Although I suspect it's naive to imagine them vaulting us to 'contender' status in their second full years as NHLers. They'd probably need another year or two to do that - even granting that they can be players of that order.

 

I'm having an even harder time envisioning the back end in 2021. A 35-year-old Weber, and - what? Mete and Juulsen?

 

I agree that next season is a write-off, but from my admittedly incomplete knowledge of the talent pool, I have a hard time right now projecting a Cup contender. Or does the entire plan really depend on the Habs scoring 3-4 really elite prospects between now and 2020?

 

If this is right, then a whole lot depends on the decisions to be made about Patches in particular, as well as the next couple of drafts.

[Machine of Loving Grace]

1 hour ago, Metallica said:

Not everyone, you get these who only follow the team when they're in the playoffs. The one's people referring to as " bandwagon jumper's". These aren't true fans.

Bandwagon fans are fans.

 

There is no True Scotsman for sports fans.

 

I don't care if you can't name a single player and simply like the colours. You are the same level as the diehard who goes to 20 games a year with a Habs logo on their garage.

 

I'm tired of gatekeeping.

[Commandant]

3 hours ago, The Chicoutimi Cucumber said:

 

I can see the FW unit being pretty good if and when those two emerge as major players.  Although I suspect it's naive to imagine them vaulting us to 'contender' status in their second full years as NHLers. They'd probably need another year or two to do that - even granting that they can be players of that order.

 

I'm having an even harder time envisioning the back end in 2021. A 35-year-old Weber, and - what? Mete and Juulsen?

 

I agree that next season is a write-off, but from my admittedly incomplete knowledge of the talent pool, I have a hard time right now projecting a Cup contender. Or does the entire plan really depend on the Habs scoring 3-4 really elite prospects between now and 2020?

 

If this is right, then a whole lot depends on the decisions to be made about Patches in particular, as well as the next couple of drafts.

 

It's a little optimistic, that's why I say two years is a best-case scenario.  It could take longer. 

 

The more assets we add, the better chance of making it quicker though. 

[The Chicoutimi Cucumber]

You know, I've been wondering about this. The standard narrative is that we haven't had a "rebuild" in decades, and that this is one reason for all the mediocrity since 1993.

 

But it seems to me we've been in the exact same situation we're in now, a number of times. Most strikingly, the early Gainey years. The team had sucked for years under Houle. Gainey became GM in 2003, and the whole idea was to draft and develop, supplementing whatever we developed with UFAs if possible.

 

That's where Carey Price, Tomas Plekanec, Mike Ribeiro, Mike Komisarek, the Kostitsyn bothers, Chris Higgins, Maxime Lapierre, Josh Gorges, and Guillaume Latendresse all came from. These guys were added to relatively young veterans like Saku Koivu and Andrei Markov, and supplemented by UFAs like Kovalev and Hamrlik.

 

We have forgotten that this was a genuine rebuild. Why have we forgotten? Because we didn't bag any #1 overall picks, because none of the players in question except Price were elite players, and because the team never put together a deep Cup run.

 

But it was a rebuild nonetheless. A starting from scratch and building a team mostly from within.

 

Something analogous, albeit less clear-cut, occurred between 2010 and 2013. A number of internally-developed players were added to a core of guys in their primes. Pacioretty, Subban, the Gal(l)ys, Eller, and a bunch of promising guys who never really panned out (Beaulieu, Tinordi, Bournival, Diaz, Sekac, etc.) were brought along under the shelter of a whack of UFAs hired on 4-year contracts in 2010. This was a rebuild in disguise. And I'd note that it involved a 3rd overall pick (Galchenyuk) and a player who developed into a top-5 player at his position (Subban), which is exactly the sort of thing we are hoping to see from the current rebuild.

 

I think, then, that it may be a myth that the Habs have not done proper rebuilds since 1993. (You could even argue that the early Houle years involved something like a rebuild, with guys like Rucinsky, Darcy Tuker, Valeri Bure, Malakhov, Brisebois, Koivu, etc. being brought in. The problem was that they were radically mismanaged).

 

Why say all this? Well, the team is right now in a position quite analogous to the one Gainey inherited. And I suspect the rebuild will look quite similar to that one, i.e., unlikely to yield multiple superstars. A realistic Habs fan needs to recognize that the most probable outcome is the same pattern as in the past.

 

This prognosis becomes especially plausible when we contemplate the Bergevin factor. This management group could not work with two of the most talented players the Habs drafted and developed over the past decade, i.e., PK Subban and Alex Galchenyuk. This raises serious questions about why we think it will be able to work with the next wave of talented young players. What is this optimism based on? No organization can win if it depends on all its players being as supremely coachable and old-school as Brendan Gallagher. You need to be able to get the most out of a variety of types of player and personality. Current management has a track record of failing at this.

 

Also, just bringing along a wave of good youngsters is not enough. We've done that many times. You have to make a series of right decisions about those youngsters - in particular, you have to be able to take a good hand and turn it into a championship-calibre hand. That's a distinct skill from "rebuilding" per se. If we are fortunate, this new rebuild may yield a team as good as the 2014 and 2015 teams. But we have no evidence at all that Bergevin knows what to do with a good team. In fact, all the evidence we have suggests exactly the opposite. He made all the wrong moves after 2015 and brought us directly to the situation we're now in. Yet here we are hoping that he can manage to put himself back in that position.

 

The optimism is all well and good. But I feel that I've been down this road before, more than once - and with better GMs at the helm. I fear that the fans who are all happy that we're "finally" embracing a rebuild may be under-estimating the extent to which we are, in fact, reliving Groundhog Day.

 

 

[IN THE HEARTS OF MEN]

I don’t believe this to be accurate. Gainey technically rebuilt the team through free agency and the Gomez trade...

 

And we’ve been going about or business on a  year by year basis ever since the turn of the century basically.

 

-price we got 5 because of the lockout!

-galchenyuk we got 3 cause we bombed out that year

-sergachev we got because price got hurt and MB replaced him with Ben f⚽️❌kin scrivens

-kokeniami because again price was garbage and MB  missed out on his calculations.

 

 

Everything else is regular transactions during a hockey season/ off season 

 

kovy was traded for... 

[Machine of Loving Grace]

5 hours ago, The Chicoutimi Cucumber said:

I think, then, that it may be a myth that the Habs have not done proper rebuilds since 1993. (You could even argue that the early Houle years involved something like a rebuild, with guys like Rucinsky, Darcy Tuker, Valeri Bure, Malakhov, Brisebois, Koivu, etc. being brought in. The problem was that they were radically mismanaged).

 

Cucumber, you can't call drafting a rebuild. 

 

Brisebois was a 2nd round pick, Bure was a second round pick we got for trading Cassels (a top six centre we couldn't wait for him to develop), Tucker was a sixth round pick who just so happened to play for one of the best CHL teams of all time, Koivu was a 21st overall pick who was better than everyone drafted before him aside from Pronger, Kariya, and Arnott. Rucinsky was a former 20th overall pick from Edmonton we should have taken instead of Bilodeau. That's not rebuilding. That's just drafting. 

 

Every team should be drafting well enough to bring in good young talent to replace the old talent leaving. Between 1995 and 2000 (between their Cups) the New Jersey Devils drafted Petr Sykora, Colin White, Willie Mitchell, Scott Gomez, and Brian Gionta. That wasn't a rebuild. That was just drafting well.Many of your examples are just teams doing their regular drafting at regular spots. 

 

When a team rebuilds there is a concerted effort to land top 10 draft picks. It's not a bad year. It's trading skilled vets for draft picks. It's short term deals because you don't want a guy for too long on a losing team. 1999-2004 should have been tanking years but Jose Theodore decided to become a Hart trophy winner out of nowhere and took a team in 2002 that should have been bottom 3 to the playoffs. 03-04 had Ribeiro and Ryder coming while all the defencemen the team had drafted in those years slipping in (with some slipping out on waivers) and along with Theo got to the playoffs when they shouldn't have been there. But there was never a real effort to rebuild. It was just a transition from Savard to Gainey.

[xXx..CK..xXx]

7 hours ago, The Chicoutimi Cucumber said:

You know, I've been wondering about this. The standard narrative is that we haven't had a "rebuild" in decades, and that this is one reason for all the mediocrity since 1993.

 

But it seems to me we've been in the exact same situation we're in now, a number of times. Most strikingly, the early Gainey years. The team had sucked for years under Houle. Gainey became GM in 2003, and the whole idea was to draft and develop, supplementing whatever we developed with UFAs if possible.

 

That's where Carey Price, Tomas Plekanec, Mike Ribeiro, Mike Komisarek, the Kostitsyn bothers, Chris Higgins, Maxime Lapierre, Josh Gorges, and Guillaume Latendresse all came from. These guys were added to relatively young veterans like Saku Koivu and Andrei Markov, and supplemented by UFAs like Kovalev and Hamrlik.

 

We have forgotten that this was a genuine rebuild. Why have we forgotten? Because we didn't bag any #1 overall picks, because none of the players in question except Price were elite players, and because the team never put together a deep Cup run.

 

But it was a rebuild nonetheless. A starting from scratch and building a team mostly from within.

 

Something analogous, albeit less clear-cut, occurred between 2010 and 2013. A number of internally-developed players were added to a core of guys in their primes. Pacioretty, Subban, the Gal(l)ys, Eller, and a bunch of promising guys who never really panned out (Beaulieu, Tinordi, Bournival, Diaz, Sekac, etc.) were brought along under the shelter of a whack of UFAs hired on 4-year contracts in 2010. This was a rebuild in disguise. And I'd note that it involved a 3rd overall pick (Galchenyuk) and a player who developed into a top-5 player at his position (Subban), which is exactly the sort of thing we are hoping to see from the current rebuild.

 

I think, then, that it may be a myth that the Habs have not done proper rebuilds since 1993. (You could even argue that the early Houle years involved something like a rebuild, with guys like Rucinsky, Darcy Tuker, Valeri Bure, Malakhov, Brisebois, Koivu, etc. being brought in. The problem was that they were radically mismanaged).

 

Why say all this? Well, the team is right now in a position quite analogous to the one Gainey inherited. And I suspect the rebuild will look quite similar to that one, i.e., unlikely to yield multiple superstars. A realistic Habs fan needs to recognize that the most probable outcome is the same pattern as in the past.

 

This prognosis becomes especially plausible when we contemplate the Bergevin factor. This management group could not work with two of the most talented players the Habs drafted and developed over the past decade, i.e., PK Subban and Alex Galchenyuk. This raises serious questions about why we think it will be able to work with the next wave of talented young players. What is this optimism based on? No organization can win if it depends on all its players being as supremely coachable and old-school as Brendan Gallagher. You need to be able to get the most out of a variety of types of player and personality. Current management has a track record of failing at this.

 

Also, just bringing along a wave of good youngsters is not enough. We've done that many times. You have to make a series of right decisions about those youngsters - in particular, you have to be able to take a good hand and turn it into a championship-calibre hand. That's a distinct skill from "rebuilding" per se. If we are fortunate, this new rebuild may yield a team as good as the 2014 and 2015 teams. But we have no evidence at all that Bergevin knows what to do with a good team. In fact, all the evidence we have suggests exactly the opposite. He made all the wrong moves after 2015 and brought us directly to the situation we're now in. Yet here we are hoping that he can manage to put himself back in that position.

 

The optimism is all well and good. But I feel that I've been down this road before, more than once - and with better GMs at the helm. I fear that the fans who are all happy that we're "finally" embracing a rebuild may be under-estimating the extent to which we are, in fact, reliving Groundhog Day.

 

 

This is pretty much how I feel. 

 

The two threads on the topic start with "Finally" and "Time". Well, "finally" it's "time" that Bergevin should have been shown the door if we're going down this route. I'm not even a pure Bergevin hater but while people feared that he would make moves to "save his job", in reality doing things this way is what really is saving as well as prolonging his job. He doesn't deserve that chance. If we're going to completely attempt to wait it out and reshape the team, it's not like he has the upper hand on every single person out there. 

 

That is a very small point in it all, but it's the way I feel. He had some opportunities to put the team closer to contention prior to "having" to go this route. 

 

On the first half of the post, I agree even more. We've been through this before and out of the draft picks obtained from accepting a terrible record for a year or two, we'll likely get 1 elite player that we couldn't have gotten otherwise had we still remained competitive and sought out improving the team. IT's completely possible things work out great, but I don't see this as being a path that gets a team into the "top tier" any time soon. Like you said, we haven't drafted 1st overall in any of these situations, and likely won't again.

[The Chicoutimi Cucumber]

Machine, I think a rebuild is better defined as a sustained period where a team prioritizes development over immediate results. But rather than argue over the meaning of 'rebuild,' I'll reiterate that we seem to be heading for something analogous to the early Gainey years. After all, if Jose Theodore prevented those teams from reaping all those high picks, that is precisely what Price stands to do for us. Consider that many of us have been saying that a return to form by Price will likely make us a bubble team even with the crap we're icing. And the stated goal is still to make the playoffs.

 

I don't say this to be critical. The point is just that I don't believe we are embarking upon a radical 'bottoming-out,' four-years-of-top-three-picks rebuild. We aren't doing anything we haven't seen a couple of times since 1993 IMHO. And this makes it hard for me to get too excited. 

[Machine of Loving Grace]

39 minutes ago, The Chicoutimi Cucumber said:

I don't say this to be critical. The point is just that I don't believe we are embarking upon a radical 'bottoming-out,' four-years-of-top-three-picks rebuild. We aren't doing anything we haven't seen a couple of times since 1993 IMHO. And this makes it hard for me to get too excited. 

 

I'm with you on that. Until I see Pacioretty and Weber traded with talk of Price asked to wave his no movement this is just dipping toes in the shallow end.

[l<OV4L3V]

On 2018-07-02 at 7:02 PM, Machine of Loving Grace said:

 

I'm with you on that. Until I see Pacioretty and Weber traded with talk of Price asked to wave his no movement this is just dipping toes in the shallow end.

Pacioretty's stock is way higher than Weber's, we should trade him before the stink season while it's still near the green with most teams
MB needs to get fired for Weber to get moved
Price would waive his NTC, our GM is just too much of a wimp to admit that his master plan has epically failed
 

[Zowpeb]

This team isn't rebuilding until it does a whole bunch of things differently (some of this we are doing, some of it we aren't - which is why I think they're just re-tooling to continue be a playoff contender instead of a Cup contender...same old, same old):

- Change leadership at the top; why does anyone expect the same group to provide different results? 

- Improve our development system significantly - that means not only skills development, trainers and personnel but relationships with minor league teams where we need them to help us support our prospects development goals.  If this doesn't happen then everything else is wasted time/effort.

- Use the salary cap room to effectively "buy" a few prospects, or preferably, draft picks for the next 1-2 years...make sure this doesn't spill into your window of contention years.

- Trades higher value guys NOW for high picks or high ceiling prospects; if we aren't possibly contending for the next 3 years then sitting on guys like Pacioretty, Price, Weber, Gallagher is pointless - trade them to try and coincide our future value with our window to contend.

- Take the next 1-2 years where they acquire/sign players on short deals and flip them for prospects/picks at deadline time.  Guys like Radulov when we signed him (if they weren't going to re-sign him he should have been traded to get real value on his play);  sign guys that can play up a line and drive up his value a little more (exactly what Danault and Desharnais have been for us - guys playing up a line or two - trade them and rinse and repeat that concept for a couple years). 

- stop trading elite young players, should be obvious but apparently wasn't MB.

- Use the acquired picks to draft more guys with high ceilings - which can mean some more boom/bust types as opposed to the "character" types. 

- ONLY draft BPA in first 3 rounds every year.  Fill/augment for need in rounds 4 and beyond.

- Package picks to move UP in drafts instead of down.  Put more value on higher ceiling players that can go higher in drafts instead of pick volume.

- As your top propsects become legit top 6 forwards and top 4 defenders it should coincide with a lot of salary cap room.  ONLY then should they use that cap room to grab a top tier free agent forward, goalie and D-man to compliment these young players...prefer this be FA's and not via trades of other prospects because then you can trade your excess for more picks to extend your window of contention when your youth becomes expensive.

 

I can live with 3 years of being a crap club if it meant coming out of that with 5-6 stellar young prospects (and probably 2-3 more that are depth pieces) all hitting their NHL stride and $35M+ in cap room to play with. 

 

I think I just described the Maple Leafs over-haul.  It was obvious to folks that Toronto needed to do that for a long, long, time...same as it's been obvious about the Habs since the late 90's.  It's the culture of ownership and leadership that prevents them from making the hard choices.

[Machine of Loving Grace]

12 minutes ago, Zowpeb said:

I think I just described the Maple Leafs over-haul.  It was obvious to folks that Toronto needed to do that for a long, long, time...same as it's been obvious about the Habs since the late 90's.  It's the culture of ownership and leadership that prevents them from making the hard choices.

 

If Molson told Bergevin they just needed to accumulate picks this season, that tells me Molson's eyes are opened. He's gonna find a GM that actually wants to build from the ground up. I figure Julien Brisebois wasn't ready to leave Tampa.