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Around The League - 2023-24 Regular Season

Bingo.

There are levels of politics that come into play when you acquire a player like Staal late in his career, along with getting him to lift his no-trade clause to go somewhere he didn't really want to be in to begin with.
 
GGpX said:
Bingo.

There are levels of politics that come into play when you acquire a player like Staal late in his career, along with getting him to lift his no-trade clause to go somewhere he didn't really want to be in to begin with.
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The analytics would argue that he never actually showed up, thereby voiding any agreement.
 
I hope the Staal agreement doesn't carry into the playoffs. Anyway, just a horrible scouting job by the Habs, their evaluation should have concluded he was done.
 
Saw a clip with Torterella where he answered some question, either before or after the last game, about his future with a polite non-comital. Said he would rather focus on the game. Game..what game? No meaningful last game for Columbus. He seemed calm ,collected, at peace ...he may already know where he is going and happy about the whole thing?

Whatever went wrong in the last year in Columbus was major...I really saw them as a dark horse contender, especially with Torts having had them overachieving for awhile.
 
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Yeah, perhaps. But they had done well a year after losing major talent. A great pair of young cornerstones on defence, depth up front even if not all that strong down the middle. But things went wrong out of the gate with the Dubois thing. Max wasn't much help, Laine didn't add anything, and on and on......
 
A coach can only do so much with a team that has middling talent. They lost Panarin and Bobrovsky for nothing; They traded for Duchene and lost him for nothing. Their #1 center quit on the team and they traded him for the mopping Finn whose head is more into video games than it is hockey. Cam Atkinson, with 4 more years at 5'9" and soon to be 32 years old, has seen his production drop from his prime. The Anderson-Domi traded backfired bigtime on them. Seth Jones 14 months away from being a UFA, Werenski 14 months from being an RFA and word is out that the second he's able to, he's going to Detroit.

Add to that, Columbus's prospect pipeline is nothing to write home about. They have a bunch of nice prospects, but there isn't a future superstar in there.

Columbus is going to have to make some big, big decisions this summer, and I think Torts kinda knows that the writing's on the wall and the next few years are going to be real difficult.
 
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