Offseason game thread- shed your salty tears
- Thread starter Dummy Hoy
- Start date
The 2007 Giants made the playoffs despite losing the regular season finale. They didn’t back in. I don’t agree.
I simply do not believe no one was concerned about Ullmark. He was clearly severely hindered.
What gets me is they had a good goalie waiting in the wings. There was no reason to force it. At least with Rask against the Islanders there was some legitimate doubt about the other guy. That wasn't the case this time around.
Yeah great Monty. Maybe next year it will help.
Christ. I get he has to say that but he was a deer in the headlights. He and the org will never get that chance again. It's not enough to say this stuff in hindsight. They need to address the decision-making and self-scouting process.
Christ. I get he has to say that but he was a deer in the headlights. He and the org will never get that chance again. It's not enough to say this stuff in hindsight. They need to address the decision-making and self-scouting process.
Oh cool you mean the things that coaches do all the time in the playoffs to counter opponents. Glad you're learning on the job. 
Monty froze. Period. end of discussion. The spotlight was too searing for him. And I don't think he'll ever be able to overcome that.
Sounds like Grady/Pedro:
Monty: How are you feeling?
Ullmark: I feel great coach, ready to get back in the net.
Monty: Great, you're in.
Monty: How are you feeling?
Ullmark: I feel great coach, ready to get back in the net.
Monty: Great, you're in.
I wish they weren't doing this presser. It changes nothing, obviously, and just gives me less faith that anyone there knows what they're doing. Better to maintain radio silence until training camp.
It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation for them. They do it and we call them idiots based on their answers. If they didn't do a presser, we'd call them cowards.
No surgeries upcoming for any player.
View: https://twitter.com/mattyports/status/1655964398047969280?s=20
View: https://twitter.com/mattyports/status/1655964398047969280?s=20
Very true. It's just not a lot of fun to see them exposed as clueless. Donnie is a smart guy but no one at this thing looks good right now.
There's no way they could spin the Ullmark situation into a positive light. They were always going to take the L on that.
Some of the other stuff, meh. Monty is not the first guy to put the lines in a blender in the post season or being late to tactical adjustments. At least he's admitting mistakes were made and not ducking the question or giving some BS excuse. The question now will be if he/they repeat the same mistakes or if they learn and grow from them.
Neely signaling a busy few months up ahead.
View: https://twitter.com/mattyports/status/1655966886994100229?s=20
View: https://twitter.com/mattyports/status/1655966886994100229?s=20
Someone should ask Charlie to name the 4th line:
View: https://twitter.com/MickColageo/status/1655967936664965120?s=20
View: https://twitter.com/MickColageo/status/1655967936664965120?s=20
Eh, Charlie stays out of things and lets the hockey guys run the team. That's all anyone could want from him.
Wonder if JJ is in poor health. He's usually at these things as the Governor. Maybe just chilling up in Buffalo.
View: https://twitter.com/mattyports/status/1655968372410941441?s=20
View: https://twitter.com/mattyports/status/1655968372410941441?s=20
Yeah, I have no real issue with them under the current landscape. They hand over the checkbook to hockey ops and get out of the way which is ideal. This year they exceeded the cap byt quite a bit this year with Reilly and Wagner burried in Providence so no complaints on the ownership side, they greenlit additional spending.
I would just love to give them a test sometimes to see if they actually know what's going on. When was the last time Jeremy was at a game?
It seems to me that once Jacbos got the salary cap he wanted so badly, he immediately stepped back and let the hockey guys run things. And he wasn't afraid to make big changes when warranted, like firing Dave Lewis after one year.
Completely agreed. Sucks that they made those mistakes, but it would be worse if they weren’t recognizing them as such with the benefit of hindsight.
Well, that's the best way, here. Monty withered and I've little confidence in his ability to avoid a repeat. Beyond that, there's the whole Miller situation, where "we investigated ourselves and we promise it won't happen again!" was the outcome.
I've little faith in this management's ability to draft or retool.
It depends on how you want to define a success but this front office is one of the few that have actually threaded the needle on a re-tool. That's essentially what they did the first 2 years of Sweeney's tenure. Reset the cap, treaded water for a few years, then were built back up into an elite team. Never got across the ultimate finish line but by and large they've been a top 5 team in the league for like 7-8 years running.
I've said my piece on the drafting thing. I think they are better than average they just haven't had any high picks and also have traded a lot of picks. 9 Sweeney draft picks were on the roster in the post-season. None of those players were selected in the top 10 of their draft, 6 of them were drafted outside the first round. Compare that to Toronto who bottomed out for the Shannaplan, they have 5 Shannahan era drafted players on their roster, 3 of them were top 10 picks (Mattews, Marner, Nylander). And they've never won a game outside of the first round. Edmonton is looking good but they had like 10 years of last place finishes and lottery picks to work with including multiple lottery wins allowing them to select the best player in the world. Colorado is a recent juggernaut that was built through the draft, but it took years of bottomling out to land MacKinnon (1st), Rantanen (10th), Landeskog (2nd) and Cale Makar (4th). The bottomline, IMO, is it's really really hard to find cornerstone players in the draft outside of picking in the top 5-10 for multiple seasons. There just aren't McAvoy's and Pastnrak's sitting the late teen's and twenties every year that this front office is constantly whiffing on.
As far as Monty goes, this was only his 2nd full season behind an NHL bench. I'm not sure it's prudent to write him off entirely. It's very difficult to coach in the post season. Sometimes coaches push buttons and it turns things around and they're hailed as a genious. Other times they push buttons, it doesn't works, and they are nevous nellies who panicked. Last season we criticised Cassidy because he was slow to react and make adjustments. This year we're mad at Monty because he threw the lines in a blender, it didn't work, so it looks like he panicked. I think he deserves another crack at it, I'm not sure they'd find a better option among the retreads on the market.
Amen to all of this. People can grieve for the season however they want but the sentiment that this organization is screwed or incompetent is absolutely silly. Like 25 other fanbases would trade places with us without question.'
Imagine if the Lightning had fired Cooper after 2019 (which to me was a way worse performance).
I don't think they're incompetent. But they are staring down threading the needle towards a soft rebuild in the wake of a brutal bottle job, with big changes needed this summer due to cap concerns.
The best FO in the world is going to have a hard time with that task.
I agree with cshea that they're better drafters than they're given credit for; we're a long way from the days of Zach Hamill. Rightly or wrongly fans will never forgive Donnie for the three straight picks, but as time goes by DeBrusk alone is enough of a hit to show that draft wasn't the shitshow it's usually portrayed as.
But I envy no one in the FO this summer. It's going to be impossible to repeat the regular season they just had.
I actually think the only ones that wouldn't trade with us are Tampa, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. Toss Colorado on if you want as well with 3 cups in 25 years but a period of suck for much of the 2010s. Maybe Detroit if you value the last 40 years instead of the last 20, but 2008 was awhile ago and they've been rather adrift over the past decade. I guess if I were in the perspective of wanting to trade with any of them, the first three are the only ones where I'd say things have definitely been better.
Sure, but they've done it before. So it's not unreasonable to think they can thread it again. No guarantees of course, but it's not unprecedented.
And yeah - they won't have had a pick better than 30 in the last 6 drafts (counting this one coming up). It's tough to think much of anything drafting wise. Of course - it's very valid to question the usage of picks in the trades, but it's basically an incomplete for drafting for me since the 2017 draft.
I was thinking more in the "moving forward" sense but yeah if it's trading the past 10-15 years then you're spot on.
I'd rather be the Bruins than Tampa going forward, personally (although there are a lot of similarities).
Yeah they have a good core for the future. The only piece missing is a 1C and then you have everything you want to build around for a hockey team. Two elite defensemen, a good young goalie, an elite goalscorer, and a couple mid-career wingers who can put the puck in the net and make plays. Obviously top centers are hard to find, but once they get past the cap crunch of this year, they are set up really well for the next 5-7 years to be able to compete in that window.
Nobody said the job would be easy, but the question seems to be if this front office and coaching staff is the right ones for the job.
I would probably argue that they are. Sweeney and Neely have threaded this needle before. They did a soft retool when Sweeney was hired in the spring of 2015. They didn't bottom out and ended up missing the playoffs in 15/16 by a point (which everyone blamed on Rask). Since then have been on an upward trajectory and have been one of the best teams in the league over that time period.
Man if they just take Barzal instead of Senyshyn then EVERYTHING is different about how that draft is viewed.
I'll say this: before Donnie got here I never would have thought the Bruins would have re-signed/extended a player like Pasta. I always assumed those guys would leave. He's not. That's a very good thing.