Rooster

oups, sorry. answered my own question. Didn't know Bonk was gonna miss tonight's game. The fun continues.

Fleury is quite ready for the number 1 job.

Was Kost sent back down?

True enough but, in the longer run, will they all go back to their usual habits? I know of some people who do once the 'crunch' is over. :hlogo::ghg::hlogo: I agree. That is why I said "immediately". Makes it even more apparent (only there while the emotion is there). An average team playing with heart and all out determination can do wonders. Would the Bruins have shutout the Sens prior to the trade? Probably not. Did the trade make them so much better? Probably not. They just played their hearts out and that was enough to blank the Sens.

I'd think the Panthers would want a young goalie with a lot of upside to grow with the team, not an older goalie that is in his prime before the rest of the team is.

It's amazing what playing your heart out can do. Teams often play incredible immediately after a big trade cause the players have been shaken to the core. Same people, just more heart. Incredible.

Roy got us two Stanley Cups and was arguably the best goalie of all time. He should be treated like a King at the Bell center, not scared of being booed. This is just disgraceful.

Gotta love the cap world, where teams prefer to trade for a player than picking him up for free!

Somebody has got the hickups.

Alex Kovalev has been named player of the month of November (winner of that portion of the Molson cup) by the Habs. Good God, he missed over half of that month!!!! Not a good month.

The Bruins really did not want to give Thornton the kind of money they gave him. If you followed the negotiations this summer, they were extremely relunctant to offer up the money. When it was clear that this was Thornton's market price, they decided to half-heartedly take a chance that he was going to finally make them win. They were not winning and quickly decided again that they really didn't want to be paying 6.6M for a player. Hockey wise, bad bad trade for the Bruins. They got good players back, but by far gave up the best player. There were other ways of getting a good dman and good top 6 winger....didn't have to give up Thornton....they wanted to give up Thornton. This is not the GM. This is the ownership. I feel sorry for Bruins fans. That organization sucks!

This is just ridiculous! How much bad luck can a team get at a single point in time! Unbelievable!

Damn, he's gonna be a star plus he's sooooooo good looking. How could we have let him get away

I don't think anybody is saying that Hainsey, Hossa or whomever else will be stars, just that we could have used Hainsey last night, we could use Hossa over Dags and etc. Is any of this a big deal? NO! Could it have been prevented with tighter roster management, yes. Is it a big deal? No. (wait, I've said that already).

Quite a nice way around the prohibition on one way contracts. I was wondering about that while I wrote. Giving Streit compensation if he didn't play, IS -to the extent of the guaranteed compensation- a one way contract. They just give the money to a third person -can't believe the CBA didn't contemplate that. Silly little loophole. But yeah, the compensation would in any event not be greater than the dif. between what he has earned as per games played and $550,000 (his salary for the full NHL year). Nothing that would affect management's decision on who to play if they had a clear preference for someone else. To be fair, hindsight was unfortunately not available at the end of training camp. Hainsey didn't prove anything and Streit did have potential. They made a call that was reasonable at the time it was made. Where they might have erred is by not taking the safest possible route (they didn't do that in Hossa's case either). The safest route would have been to send Streit down and play Hainsey - keeping the possibility of calling up Streit without having to clear waivers on the way up if Hainsey didn't do -or in the case of injuries. With Hossa, they could have sent Perezhogin down after camp (only one that didn't need to clear waivers) and then see how the players panned out during the season (they would have seen early on that Dags was no worth his spot -which he didn't really show during preseason-) and Perezhogin would have been called up and Dags out. They are professional management and they make calls they feel comfortable with, without necessarily having to take the longest, safest road. However, in both these cases, they seem to have made minor mistakes and the safest route would have prevented that.

I'm not sure, but I don't think it was a 30 game guaranteed clause......more of a payment the Habs had to make if he didn't play 30 games (cause the CBA didn't allow the Habs to offer him a one way contract which is what he wanted to come to NA). Anyways, this is kinda semantics.....even if he was guaranteed 30 games played, what would happen if the Habs disregarded that? No court would grant an injunction forcing the Habs to play Streit, he would be awarded damages in the form of money. Same difference. Nothing really stops the Habs from not playing him. I think they want to play him, they haven't given up on him.

So what's the deal with not wanting Euros? What you're saying is you want guys who play physical and with emotion. Fair enough. You seem to have mentionned quite a few "Euros" that fit that description. Btw, a lot of these Russian guys come from places east of the Ural mountains. They are Asians:) [Edited on 2005/11/30 by Rooster]

When all are healthy, Streit is the 7th dman. If we add another top 4 without substracting, Komi becomes number 7. Not something I think we want. I think the D problem is two fold 1) need to upgrade a top 4 to more offense (Markov excluded) and 2) need to add depth - the good prospect type and maybe one borderline NHLer. Souray (and his salary) is very expendable if we can get a top four strong offensive dman.

definitely better than Ozolinsh and Souray. Like it's been said, what's the price?

Doesn't the 39M cap have to include benefits paid to players -allowing them to go to the dentist and stuff- (making it like a 38M or so cap)?

Problem is we would have to unload salary in any trade where we would pick up salary such as Ozolinsh's.

Excellent post GoHabs! Thanks for the thoughtful analysis. :/)

I love Begin, but he is not a second line center. He has a grinder role to play with the team and he plays it beautifully. Take him out of that role, make him into something he is not and start playing him on the first and second line and he will start to look silly and useless. Keep him in his role, he is very good at playing that role.

yeap, I was really shocked at how dman poor our last draft, free agent season and other off season acquisitions was.

Unless the best available player is a goalie:) Sorry, I've got to stop with the cheap shots.