tomh009

Five games left for the Habs. Philly is six points ahead, Seattle five, so those look pretty unlikely, too. On the other hand, we keep offering opportunities to Arizona (two points behind) but they have not grasped one of those yet. Not likely but there is still some hope.

So, Price is about 2.00 GAA, but the team has yet to score for him ...

He's making $750/175K now -- wouldn't he be worth that even if he doesn't play a single NHL game next year?

Basically it removes all ability to accumulate cap space, the way the Habs did last season by shuffling players to Laval.

Or would someone trade from 1st overall down to, say, fifth, for a late second-round pick? I think not. The values really do drop down much faster than this, especially in the first round.

Lehkonen 2g+3a in 9 games, playing 17-18 minutes/game, a bigger role than he had in Montreal even though the Avs are a stronger team. I suspect that the Avalanche think they got good value in this trade. Maybe this will have been a win-win trade?

Losing Chiarot and Lehkonen hurts defensively. And especially with Caufield going through a dry spell, they are not scoring enough to make up for that.

Habs and Coyotes both 2-8 in their last ten games. Unlikely they will catch us but all it takes is a few surprise games.

I always watch through a goalie's eyes as I play goalie (at the beer league level) so maybe I pay more attention to the defensive faux pas. The Capitals have elite forwards, and the Habs didn't cover them well. And there were deflections that could only be saved with luck. Not to say that he shouldn't have saved some of the others. But they gave up 23 (!) high-danger scoring chances, as compared to 9 last night. That's normally going to result in significantly more scoring.

Romanov and Savard on the ice for five of the six even-strength Caps goals. I think they were on for most of the ones against Columbus, too. Is Romanov getting tired?

That's a four-game drought for Caufield now.

Did he have zero value? He was not traded, but we don't know how he was valued. If we put him on waivers and he clears, then we will know that he has zero value.

Caufield makes some excellent defensive plays, more than I would have expected. But I think D-zone coverage is not ingrained in him yet. Yeah, he was close. He's not nearly big enough to push Ovechkin around but he certainly could have attempted to get his stick on the puck and disrupt Ovechkin's shot.

Hoffman and Romanov are trying to help out ...

Weaker ... particularly less experienced (Petry has not been stellar this year, either, so the downgrade is really from Chiarot). My expectation is that they'll sign him -- but that they'll trade him with the right offer. But at this point I think he has actual non-zero trade value, if signed to a reasonable contract.

Yes. He's been by far our best D-man on power play.

Dom L's player stats in the Athletic actually rank his market value as second-highest of all the Habs' regular D-men. I do think their model overvalues offence, though, and undervalues defensive attributes. But that 25 point total is almost twice that of Savard (the next best now that Chiarot was traded) which brings up his value in Dom's model.

Kraken 73gms 52pts Habs 75gms 51pts Coyotes 74gms 49pts

He wasn't particularly outstanding tonight, to be sure. But his health is really the much bigger question anyway, as you say.

I'm pretty sure we haven't outshot anyone 2:1 this year yet.

Pitlick, Armia and Evans have looked dangerous all night but can't get the puck past Sirokin.

Wideman was the other D, right? But I think he was pinching and no one else covered for him ...

Welcome back to the Habs D, Carey! 😢

Last time they were giving up this few shots was AZ, exactly a month ago.

If we're not doing BPA ... would we draft another LD in the first round? Seems a bit crowded in that position.