Lol, literally eating frozen pizza and watching Eichel highlights right now

you're crazy

the problem with our roster is a top heavy roster that doesn't produce

I'm now a full time advocate of the colorado model: have 3 blue collar guys making 4 million rather than one guy making 12 million. depth matters bc the stars can go cold/get hurt etc. etc.

eichel would be a different player same problem.

like honestly, is a bottom 6 of galch, soup, the decaying corpse of foligno/simmonds, spezza and engvall a contending bottom 6?? like, idk, it works if the stars produce but we're on year 5 of that not happening

my guy the Avs have a roster of MacKinnon, Rantanen and Makar and Landeskog. thats as top heavy as it comes, they are just fortunate enough to have them on amazing contracts

im lowkey not taking this loss to heart. sucks cause it was montreal but the team clearly needs a change

Marner has to go, whether it’s for Eichel or picks and prospects. You can not pay a winger $10.9 million to score ZERO goals in his last 18 playoff games!!

ok look....

yes.

but still, they have 4 lines of speed/grit/youth/skill, they lose kadri and don't lose a step etc. etc. Burakovsky was playing on their 3rd line lmao - we had wayne simmonds who was literally useless.

I honestly wonder whether we're screwed until we finally get a good prospect pipeline going, like the avs do, so we can avoid the cheap league min dumpster waste that pops up every offseason and we can actually have some good players on seriously valuable contracts

it'll take time, bc the drafting from 2015-2018 was dreadful, but still - hopefully things look up eventually

i agree, whether its for laine, eichel, pettersson idgaf what they have to add, get it done

I agree, he’s popular in the room, but it’s a business

the avs were really blessed with the Makar ELC and MacKinnons steal of a contract. Landeskog also. Leafs gotta get back to building a team of straight skilled players again.

hes a 24 year old man getting paid 10.93M to play for his childhood team, no excuses but to step up to the plate and he failed to do it. Nylander showed real leadership for half the price. he made way too many braindead plays and didnt make up for it by getting on the board, inexcusable tbh

Marner for Eichel sounds like a great starting point for a trade. Three great centres will make for three scoring lines.

I concur

yeah it's funny how we went for veteran experience when meanwhile the best team in the NHL is insanely young. bellmare and soderberg are the vets, and they are occassionally scratched as depth, and most certainly not stapled to the top powerplay unit like simmonds/thornton were lmao

youth/speed/skill with a tinge of grit/toughness and playoff tenacity has to be the direction for this team imo

the gritty/tough old guys bs backfired miserably

I keep getting crap for preferring Nylander over Marner, or Draisaitl over McDavid, $4MM goes a long way in the middle of a lineup.

Leafs would have to add Robertson and 1st

Sabres decline

tell me what they gotta add cause ill do whatever it takes, i hope kyle dubas is thinking the same

*if it happens* JT or Eichel becomes a winger

i just think how would the series go if tavares was playing and foligno and hyman werent playing injuree. still inexcusable to lose to the damn habs

problem with that theory is they outscored the habs like 11-2 after the JT injury through games 2-4

matthews didn't record a shot attempt through 20 minutes of a game 7, that's absolutely inexcusable. in normal circumstances our stars would've had to carry, but ESPECIALLY with the injuries it was even MORE necessary that those guys throw the team on their back like brayden point etc. did when stamkos was out.

their (marner/matthews) response was a long, wet, fart and one goal through 14 combined games

you see i agree with this , however matthews led the series in shot attempts and was also rock solid defensively, i feel like marner had alot to do with matthews not burying. marner had the puck die on his stick wayyyy too many times. also trying to run the powerplay through marner was inexcusable

Running the PP through Marner in itself isn't an issue, but they didn't construct the PP in a way that was conducive to Marner being the primary distributor.

it 100% was the issue, teams know hes not a shooting threat so they can cheat and play matthews. teams know marner is looking for 2 things, a pass to the front of the net or a cross scene to matthews. way too predictable

Again, that's the configuration. Yes, we know Marner is not much of a shooting threat, so you need to construct a PP that supports that if they're going to run it through him. We've seen them do that before with incredible success (PP finished 2nd in the league back to back years and I believe it was one of the best in terms of certain advanced metrics since they began tracking that stuff), so you can't say that running a PP through Marner is the issue. It's actually a pretty good idea if you do it correctly, they just didn't.

Like I'm with you, I was screaming for them to take Marner off that unit, because it didn't make sense the way had it setup, but that's not on Marner.

the way the powerplay is setup would actually be extremely effective if they made one swap, putting marner at the goal line and nylander along the half wall where marner usually is. having two shooting threats in nylander and matthews opens up way more space for marner , a high tip in the slot and obviously nylander and matthews. i believe they had it setup like that in game 4 for about 20 seconds and they scored like that.