Quoting: stuuuuuuuuuuutzle
Trading Brodie and Liljegren while bringing in Ristolainen would be so funny lol, I hope Brad is looking at this
To be clear, this is Trading Brodie and Liljegren to bring in Ristolainen and Larsson with retention, who are signed long term for a combined 5 mil and both bring an element we lack in the top 4. We know what type of player pairs best with Rielly, and Risto is better than both Lyubushkin and Schenn while bringing the same element that compliments Rielly. He's always had the talent, but was asked to carry a lot of the load on bad teams. Since Torts has come in he's actually been very solid, finishing last year with a long stretch where he was legitimately one of the best defensive D in the league when paired with Sanheim. Sanheim played the role that Rielly would play and it allowed Risto to simplify his game, even to the point where he outperformed Sanheim down the stretch. Not only does he have size and physicality, but he's also very mobile for his size, is a competent puck mover and can even provide offense from the backend. At $3 mil for 4 more years on a team like the Leafs he'll live up to that cap hit at the very least, and with the structure and talent around him would be very capable of exceeding that value, especially with the cap going up.
Larsson is another minute muncher with size and mobility who was very successful last playoffs, again at only 2 mil for 2 more years. Those 2 combined make roughly the same as what Brodie makes now, and are both bigger, more physical, better puck movers, better skaters and even slightly better offensively.
As for Mantha, he had 23 hits in 6 games the last time he played in a playoff series against Florida, almost 4 hits per game. He also had 13 penalty minutes over that span including a fighting a major. He has multiple fights over his career despite that not being his role, far from soft. Most importantly, he has great size at 6'5" 234 lbs while also being quite mobile, a common theme here.
Size isn't everything, but ideally every forward line and D pairing should have some element of it come playoff time, as battling for space becomes more critical. Each of our top 3 lines consists of a high end playmaker (Nylander, Marner, Domi), a sniper (Matthews, Tavares/Nylander, Robertson), and a PWF who can retrieve pucks and create havoc in front of the net, while having the hands in tight to pot any rebounds (Knies, Bert, Mantha).
Every D pairing has at least one guy with size and physicality who can clear the net front, kill the cycle, block shots etc. without sacrificing puck moving or mobility. The defense as a whole is bigger, more physical, more mobile, better offensively and provides more cost assurance going into the future. We wouldn't be getting eaten alive on the forecheck like we did last year, we wouldn't have Florida making their way to the front of the net whenever they wanted, we wouldn't be getting beat to the outside as much and we might actually be able to provide offense from the backend beyond just Rielly.
I said built for playoffs because these are the types of players who succeed when checking becomes tighter, space becomes more limited and the game becomes more physical. We should have learned this by now...
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Knies,
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