It will be scary what shanny and crew might do with 20M this offseason if marner and JT are not back. Will be surprised if marner comes back. There will be so much overreaction to this season if shanny is given the chance to do so. And overreaction will be to double down on even more grit and leadership.
But same as I written before - The metrics that zeke shares tells the story that if this team does not get goaltending, most nights they will lose. And they will lose like they aren’t trying due to what the management and coaches want (on top of shit effort from at least 2 of 4 guys paid $10M almost every night). Rewards go for non-creative plays made, coached to play low event hockey, dump and chase hockey when over many of a playoffs the core has shown they suck at it, bad PP to make low impact 5v5 even worse, not playing best roster, etc etc
Management is lost on a bad identify they are pushing onto players that won’t thrive in the environment. Add on trading picks, trading prospects, bad development, losing every deadline excluding Muzzin year — no wonder no one believes in the regular season record being translated into anything but another new way the team will get knocked out in round 1. Losing to Ottawa seems most appropriate.