Not a bad offer, Leafs would definitely listen, but if we accept this trade, we will be going into a re-build

its not even close to fair tho lol

its one of the best defensive pairings in the league, along with three of the best prospects in the league, and a 1st round pick. plus youre trading matthews with a super injury prone goalie and two other pretty useless players. what in the world would make you think this is fair?

also posting unclear insults is a lot more fun than posting actual opinions or analysing.

haha dont have to deal with Fox getting offer sheeted anymore

Matthews is the best US born goal scorer in the game. The Rangers are owned by a cable company in the biggest TV market in the US. Do you get more highlights from really good puck possession or from forty goals a year? Do you get more ratings from highlights of a takeaway or a breakaway? The Rangers take this. The Leafs probably don't.

Yes, fox is a defensemen that the leafs don’t need. Leafs currently need zero Dmen.

No, the leafs need good d men. Fox would be their best. If fox was magically put on the leafs right now he would be the teams second best player.

Who would you say is the best prospect here Crappo or the imaginary one you made up?

You are confusing want with need. I don’t disagree that he is awesome. Leafs just have no needs on the blueline right now. None in the foreseeable future either.

They do. If they didn’t, they would be good.

And they are, kind of a dumb non point.

Hey if this is what success looks like to you, by all means enjoy it.

Thank you, I will.

The entire post is nonsense. Having Mika center the 3rd line on any team is also pure nonsense. Not worth discussing.

they're 4-4-1 and -8, and they havent made it past the 1st round in 17 years. theyre not a good team and their defense clearly sucks lmfao

well both laffy and kakko are gonna be great, and barrons a top center prospect who's looked really good in his nhl games.

also who cares about matthews, hes rubbish in the playoffs and now rubbish in the regular season too. id much rather have zibanejad than him

Matthews has five more playoff points in one more career playoff game than Zibanejad, 24 in 32 to 19 in 31. Five more. In one more game. Even though he's younger and hasn't been past the first round. Because he at least gets his team there, consistently, and gets a few points each time. How much is five playoff points?

Zibanejad had five points in the six game series that established him as a top six center, the 2017 2nd round loss to the Senators when he moved up from the third line because Rick Nash wasn't producing, the whole team was struggling, and maybe the coaches thought he could do well against his old team. He did fine. Pageau did better, with six points, helping Ottawa win.

That was the series that launched the Senators to the conference finals and in part encouraged the Sharks and Lightning to trade two 1st picks and a prospect each for a couple of defensemen. It also somehow encouraged many teams to overpay for virtually everyone who took a shift at center in that series on either team: Pageau, Hayes, Turris, Stepan, Brassard, Dzingel, and now Zibanejad have each signed at least one contract that some of their teams' fans have eventually, or will eventually come to question. Maybe some team will sign Lindberg for $5M next year? Or Miller at 10M? They were there, too. Don't leave them out, GMs. Lindberg, with three goals and a positive plus/minus, actually did better in that series than Holden, Skjei, Fast, Girardi, Smith, Kreider, or Staal. He was then claimed in the expansion draft, and no longer plays in the NHL, because the Rangers value playoff performance. Clearly.

Anyway, if you take out those five points in six games, Zibanejad in the playoffs has a less impressive 14 points in his other 25 games. But it gets better if you take out his other second round series, when he got zero points in five games against PIttsburgh, and was -6. Wow. So clutch. Can't imagine why the Senators traded him.

And, yes, if you take out every series the Leafs lost, Matthews hasn't been to the playoffs, yet, and is pointless, but if you take out every series Zibanejad played after he was Matthews age, that does not change Zibanejad's numbers much.



I looked up projected lineups for Team Sweden at the Olympics. Everyone thinks Pettersson plays 1st line center, which I'm fine with, and sure enough, everyone's pencilled Zibanejad in at 2nd line center. You said a good way to compare centers is how much they do in the playoffs. And you said there's no team where Zibanejad should center the third line. I'm not sure if he'll be healthy in time for the Olympics, but Nick Backstrom has 108 points in 133 NHL playoff games, and has won the Stanley Cup.

Obviously the Rangers aren't going to build around Backstrom because they can't afford him. Out of what's remotely possible, Matthews is pretty good.

first of all, zibanejad's projected to be the 1c for team sweden. yes backstrom has been good in the playoffs and in internationals, but he's 33 years old, he's not exactly in his prime. the top 2 centers, even if backstrom is healthy, would be zibanejad and pettersson, no question.


now, discussing zibanejads playoff points is pointless, because since the last time he's been in the playoffs (not counting the play-in round) he's gotten significantly better. he was pretty good in the 2017 playoffs, but since then he's gone from a solid 20 goal scorer to one of the best goal scorers in the NHL. another thing of note, zibanejad has been in the 2nd round, i think that immediately makes him a better playoff performer than matthews, until matthews proves otherwise.

i was also clearly joking about matthews, he's a generational talent, and a future hall of famer, but trading adam fox who's probably, at least offensively, the best defenseman in the league, plus his linemate, PLUS three other top prospects including two top 2 picks, PLUS A 1ST ROUND PICK is ridiculous, even for matthews. that's assuming any of the previously mentioned players are touchable, which they aren't. neither team is trading any of them.

Since the 2017 playoffs, when Zibanejad became a top six forward with the Rangers, the top five Swedish-born goal scorers in the NHL playoffs are Forsberg, W. Karlsson, Backstrom, Burakovsky, and Hornqvist. Zibanejad is in a six-way tie for 25th. Just in playoff goals in the NHL by guy born in Sweden. Two of the guys he's tied with no longer play in the NHL, including Oscar Lindberg, who got three goals in the second round, when it mattered, rather than just one goal per series, for Zibanejad, in that time.

If you measure from the next year's playoffs, when Zibanejad was a better regular season goal scorer, Backstrom is still in the top five forwards, but Hedman is the team's best goal scorer. Since Hedman plays low on the left point, Sweden could use a center who is good at passing the puck across to someone at that spot. Any ideas? Oh. And in that time, Zibanejad has just one playoff goal, and does not belong in this conversation.

Okay.. Cool. I agree that Fox isn't leaving New York. When I posted this, I had forgotten (or hadn't read yet? Who knows) that he signed an extension, and I didn't know that he had talked his previous team into trading him to his hometown.

So I posted a different dose of realism on Matthews' value, but you're not gonna like it, either, because the new centerpiece is Zibanejad. I figured, between you saying it made no sense to build a team with Zib at 3C, and Toronto fans above saying it made no sense to trade their only #1C for spare defensemen, probably a more realistic Matthews trade was gonna be Zibanejad and all of the Rangers' best prospects. Not sure on which ones those are, but in the years that they've both been great goal scorers, Matthews has 37 more regular season goals than Zibanejad, and Zib has 37 more than Zucker or Skinner. I don't think Skinner and a 2nd gets the Rangers on the phone, so as a Caps fan, I'm trying to be realistic about how the Ranges and Leafs could work together, here. If you don't want to see it, that's fine. I don't think either side is desperate to trade. On the other hand, a team with Fox, Matthews, Kreider, Panarin, Schneider, Barron, Miller, and Reunanen has a lot of potential. And yes, those are the prospects I didn't trade.

anyway, here's a link if you can't help yourself. https://www.capfriendly.com/forums/thread/525316?post_id=2766529

First off, I never said anything about how to rank centers, so that's just BS. Secondly, Backstrom gets his points from Ovi, who makes his numbers look better. Mika on the other hand makes his line mates better by his all around play. Third, I was talking NHL teams, not Olympic or all star teams. And lastly, we are talking in present day terms, so what a player did 5 or 6 years ago is meaningless. Right now, TODAY, Mika is better than both of the centers you mention . Your entire post, again, is nonsense.

Lafreniere isn’t a prospect Crappo is gone to the khl and Barron is 22 and hasn’t cracked the Rangers roster. Your evaluation of players is a joke.

Drugs are bad.

Agreed, you should stop taking them.

That is some Hunter S Thompson level ****ed out of your tree thinking right there.

you know kakko and kravtsov are different people right? tf

also the leafs have spent 17 years not cracking the 2nd round, and theyll probably take longer to get past the 2nd round than barron'll take to play in the 2nd round, just felt like mentioning that