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Core 4 No More: The Motherfucking Off-Season Thread

Volcanologist said:
the reality of Tavares has fallen far short of the ideal when he was signed, but let's remember Kadri was playoff suspended several times, and secondarily, he was a lousy third line centre when put in that role here. Of course the move hasn't worked out for us, nobody would deny that...but I absolutely get why they traded him to begin with.

but honestly, with the way this team is managed, I can't say with any degree of certainty that whatever they would have done instead of signing Tavares would have been any better. good odds we'd be worse off, in fact, based on track record.

similarly, much is made of the ~3 million he's overpaid by, but what would we really be doing with that money? very likely overpaying somebody else with it, since we overpay just about everyone.
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Yeah I think people underestimate the level of safety that actually came with Tavares, relative to how risky some $5-6m signings end up being over the long haul, because they have a higher chance of going tits up.

We might have missed some great opportunities because we commit $11m to JT, but we avoided some absolute train wrecks as well, I suspect.
 
Montana said:
Yeah I think people underestimate the level of safety that actually came with Tavares, relative to how risky some $5-6m signings end up being over the long haul, because they have a higher chance of going tits up.

We might have missed some great opportunities because we commit $11m to JT, but we avoided some absolute train wrecks as well, I suspect.
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If there's one thing I trusted Dubas with, it's his decisions on who to give term to on d. I don't think he ever missed. He never had a zaitsev or a Komisarek situation. His mistakes were one year committments like Barrie and Ceci. Between Muzzin and Brodie, two perpetually underrated d around the league (but strong on the nerdies) he grabbed the right guys for prices that were not obscene, even despite the unexpected flat cap.

So I would have trusted him to identify the right guy to allocate the money to. But beyond that, I'm not a big fan of the "well he would have blown the money on trash anyway" argument. Part of the implied thesis is to not do that.
 
I'm really surprised that Tre is not building a "Western Conference-style" 4th line, with veterans who can skate/hit/cycle and kill penalties. I really expected him to make changes there.
 
Montana said:
Yeah I think people underestimate the level of safety that actually came with Tavares, relative to how risky some $5-6m signings end up being over the long haul, because they have a higher chance of going tits up.

We might have missed some great opportunities because we commit $11m to JT, but we avoided some absolute train wrecks as well, I suspect.
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And to your point, no assets given to get him.

Not his fault, that Kadri and a bunch of high draft picks were traded for 25c on the dollar
 
MindzEye said:
Also, here's a good illustration on that from recent high end UFA history.

Panarin: 14.27%
Tavares: 13.84%

That 5 year stretch of JT's we're looking at where he was the 20-30th best offensive player in the NHL? Panarin was 4th in total points, 5th in PPG, 5th in even strength points. 99-100th percentile pay for 99-100th percentile production.
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He was always going to New York tho wasn’t he?….like he wouldn’t have been a realistic option for us at the time, would he?

MindzEye said:
I mean, what if we went hunting for a 8.5 million dollar Muzzin/Brodie instead of the 5-5.5 million dollar varieties?
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Then imagine if they fell off like Brodie and we owed still them $8.5m for the kind of term $8.5m guys require, haha.






….i think with the benefit of hindsight the ideal manner of operating is still the “pay for top end talent” method we used…..but it’s pay in draft picks to acquire it, so you’re paying them $6.5-8.5m, instead of UFA prices, and not waste those picks on short term deadline rentals.

Then use your savings to fill out the roster with slightly better value buys in free agency, than we were able to afford in this era.
 
MindzEye said:
But they did when they went after Tavares.

Right idea, wrong guy.
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ya.. that one time (and it wasn't on defence, which they continue to cheap out on to their own detriment)

if you're asking me what was the likely thing they would have done with the extra money, it's not that...it would be overpaying some mid to lower roster player
 
Volcanologist said:
the reality of Tavares has fallen far short of the ideal when he was signed, but let's remember Kadri was playoff suspended several times, and secondarily, he was a lousy third line centre when put in that role here. Of course the move hasn't worked out for us, nobody would deny that...but I absolutely get why they traded him to begin with.

but honestly, with the way this team is managed, I can't say with any degree of certainty that whatever they would have done instead of signing Tavares would have been any better. good odds we'd be worse off, in fact, based on track record.

similarly, much is made of the ~3 million he's overpaid by, but what would we really be doing with that money? very likely overpaying somebody else with it, since we overpay just about everyone.
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i mean, when i say we should trade tavares, i mostly say it in fantasy land where a non-Trelivng GM is doing the trading and a non-Trelivng is doing the spending of said freed money.
 
So the argument some people are rolling with on why the Tavares signing wasn’t all that bad is really “meh, we’d have spent that money on something dumber anyway”, eh?
 
Artnes said:

View: https://x.com/OilerAlert/status/1808208651846574173
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Yeah, this is what I figured happened with Skinner.

Can’t blame a Cup-chasing vet for going to the team that just made it to game 7 of the Cup final over the team that can’t get out of the first round.

Except for the rare hometown guy who’s desperate to play in Toronto specifically, we’re going to need to have some real playoff success before we start attracting these kind of players again. Benefit of the doubt is gone at this point.
 
Preston said:
Yeah no one is advocating to trade Tavares or not sign Tavares and then spend the money in worse ways. I can't believe this has to be said.
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That’s misconstruing that he was a safe signing, and thus less likely to fail completely.


I can’t believe this has to be said, but yes if we didn’t sign Tavares and spent the money perfectly and won 6 straight cups because of it….yes your ideal magical situation would have been preferential.

It isn’t who has the better fantasy, it’s what are the probabilities in the real world, versus 20/20 hindsight flawless spending.
 
Really stretching the memory here, but I believe the cap space was created when the team chose not to extend Van Riemsdyk and Bozak - so I suppose in 1 alternative timeline the Leafs would have brought those guys back?

Here were the alternative ways to spend that cap money:

1719946762532.png
 
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