Gorbachav55
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Posts posted by Gorbachav55
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I can't believe there are people upset that Verbeek didn't get more for Ilya Freakin' Lyubushkin. As dts commented, even if you ignore the mentorship of Mintyukov (which, based on Mintyukov's comments, seems like it was pretty valuable), Verbeek turned a 4th rd pick into a 3rd rd pick. How is it even possible to criticize that?
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19 minutes ago, perry_mvp said:
Not trying to bypass the rest of your post but this part is interesting. I think the main difference between Bednar and Cooper vs Cronin is that Bendnar and Cooper won championships in various leagues before being promoted to the NHL. Wining championships or being successful in international play gets you noticed. As far as I can tell, Cronin hasn't won any championship as a head coach. Is winning a championship an absolute must to be promoted to an NHL HC position? No but it helps. Luke Richardson (Chicago), Pascal Vincent (interim Columbus), Jim Hillier (interim LA), Andrew Brunette (Nashville), Lindy Ruff (New Jersey), Mike Sullivan (Pittsburgh), Brew Bannister (interim St. Louis), Spencer Carberry (Washington) are current head coaches that were promoted to the NHL HC position without wining some kind of championship in a lower league.
There are some current HC's like Martin St Louis, Rod Brind'Amour, and Rick Tocchet who won Stanley Cups as players.
I believe the rest of the HC's in the NHL won some sort of championship or gold medal as an HC of the team they were with.
Rick Bowness was a player/HC I believe at one point many many moons ago in the early eighties.
I was not drawing any further comparisons between Cooper, Bednar, and Cronin other than that all three of them were first time NHL head coaches when they were hired by their current teams. And so it follows that having been an NHL head coach previously is NOT a prerequisite to being a successful NHL head coach currently, as Bednar and Cooper prove.
Is success in lower level head coaching gigs necessary for NHL success? Randy Carlyle didn't win anything with Manitoba. It probably helps, but I don't think it's necessarily a prerequisite either.
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36 minutes ago, hoxxey said:
I suppose it would have been more appropriate for me to say "head coaching in the NHL experience".
I can't imagine a time where someone would hire anyone for a job that they didn't have experience in - across the board in any career. Pro sports is way more demanding and result driven. It has always seemed to me that the young players would respond better to someone with a track record of winning - the more they win, the more success they get which translates to more money on the contracts.
The question is, if you were hiring someone to work for you, wouldn't you insist on interviewing candidates who have experience and a record of success? As Walter (Big Lebowski) often said "Am I wrong? Am I wrong".
Screw it, let's go bowling...
I've been away for a while, but I'm kind of starved for Ducks content while they're on break and I had to comment on this because it's completely absurd.
The answer to the bolded is yes. Yes, you are wrong.
First, if we take this by its strict definition (which you seem to be doing), if the people hired for an NHL head coaching position were only people who had ever held that position previously, there would NEVER BE ANY NEW NHL HEAD COACHES. If you took the pool of all living current and former NHL head coaches as of this moment, that would be a list of, let's say, 100 guys. Some of those guys are 90+ years old, but hey, they have experience in the job, so they're candidates. Every time someone gets fired, your pool of potential candidates comprises whichever of those 100 guys is not an active NHL head coach.
But human beings, as we know, are mortal. As those guys die off, that pool shrinks until we have fewer than 32 living head coaches with NHL experience. If the optimal strategy is to never hire any candidate who doesn't have NHL head coaching experience, and every team employs this optimal strategy, eventually they will run out of candidates as the candidates die off or become too old to hold the position. That makes no sense. You need to refresh the pool from somewhere.
Second, this is true in EVERY position in every industry. There has to be a starting point. I'm currently looking for a staff accountant - would I hire someone who has never been a staff accountant? Absolutely! If that person either has experience in related fields or is a recent graduate looking for their first job and has demonstrated through the interview process that they're capable, I would hire them. If you're looking for a higher level example, my company recently had our CEO retire. The replacement we hired has never been a CEO before, but has been an executive in our company and was an executive at a company in a related industry prior to that. I think he's a better fit than our prior CEO. He brings a new perspective, a new thought process, and he's demonstrated that he's capable of leadership through his other roles. A company would be doing itself a disservice if it didn't expand its pool to include candidates who have never held that position; they would be eliminating a lot of people who might bring fresh ideas and new ways of thinking.
Is Greg Cronin a great NHL head coach? He's not now, but it's early, and time will tell. I've seen some good things and not so good things. Is he automatically disqualified for the job because he hasn't been an NHL head coach before? Absolutely not. Was Jared Bednar unqualified before he took the Avs job? Should the Lightning never have hired that Jon Cooper guy in 2012? Unless I'm misreading your post, you think hiring those two guys was a mistake because they'd never been head coaches in the NHL before their current gigs.
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44 minutes ago, Joker8 said:
Unfortunately, you are lucking hockey knowledge.
I must be, yes. You're right.
Given that I'm "lucking" hockey knowledge, I think I'm just going to take my leave of this place. I know that I've contributed plenty to negativity here in the past, so perhaps I'm part of the problem. But in a season where the team is clearly better, where young players are progressing, and where there are new things to be excited about, the pessimism here is a bummer to me. I'm not really interested in engaging with it any more.
Hopefully I'll catch everyone sooner rather than later.
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1 hour ago, Joker8 said:
Let’s be honest: He is not the worst GM in Duck history. If you look back, Pier Gutier was painful, GM Brian Murry drafted and traded the best for us so far some of you are to young to remember. Now describing PV
Competitive - Nope
Smart – try again.
200 feet – No! Our D is painful to watch, not supporting the goalie except the hammer #7
Physical – when they feel like it and not all of them.
Hard to play against – Absolutely Positively NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That is the reason we are under 500, 28 the team in the NHL.
Z- Man is a second-line winger on his best day.
We are supposed to play the same system as the Avs. Did you watch the game last night? Missing players are not an excuse.
Other than the bolded, I disagree with all of this. They're competitive, smart, physical, and make life tough on opponents. Not every player does that, nor can they always sustain it for 60 minutes, but that's because they're still in the rebuild process. I like the progress I'm seeing.
If you don't think this team is headed in the right direction, it's because you don't want to see it.
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4 hours ago, dtsdlaw said:
Of course not, but you'd think that the highest paid players would meet most of them, no? $7M to Klingberg. $5M to Strome. $7M to Terry. I get it if a handful of role players don't meet your team identity, but I think the message gets a bit muddied when you commit so much friggen money to guys that don't meet the criteria.
Klingberg was brought in to both ensure they were at the cap floor and to get an asset at the deadline. I don't think there was any intention of him fitting in to Verbeek's long term plans for the team's culture.
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I don't think we have enough evidence one way or the other, so it comes down to whether you want to view the evidence we have through a positive, hopeful light or a negative, skeptical one.
Everyone can do their own thing, but I can tell you I'm enjoying being hopeful. Which is a nice change of pace from the other teams I root for, where there is an preponderance of evidence that things will continue to go poorly (Angels and Chargers).
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4 minutes ago, hoxxey said:
I know that you endorse the GM. I just don't.
And that's okay for us to feel that way.
At least, we're talking about it.
And I am open to listen to the "other side" of things, for the record.
But you're not "open" if you ignore reason and logic. Or use different standards to judge GMs.
My point isn't, and has never been, that Verbeek is a good GM. My point is that we don't know yet. Every day brings us closer to being able to come to a conclusion. He's done some good things and some not good things.
When it comes to the Kings and concluding that Blake is a good GM, that's fine. I don't necessarily disagree. But Blake has been there for seven years. Let's give Verbeek a lot more runway before we condemn him as a bad GM.
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4 minutes ago, hoxxey said:
I can't answer that - only the scoreboard can answer and based on watching them play and the players they have, it's yes.
I know there's no point in debating with someone who won't argue in good faith, but I'm going to do it anyway.
In what way is it fair or logical to ignore Blake's first four seasons with the Kings - the first of which he made the playoffs off of his predecessor's players, the next three of which the Kings were bad and missed the playoffs by a lot - and then hold Verbeek accountable for his first season and a half?
Wouldn't the logical thing be to wait until Verbeek has had five seasons and then see if the Ducks are comparable to the Kings? Because Blake wasn't successful until his FIFTH season with the Kings. If it were up to you, Blake would have been gone before the Kings could get back to the postseason. Wouldn't it make sense to give that same latitude to Verbeek?
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7 minutes ago, hoxxey said:
I'm not sure how Rob Blake learned how to be an effective GM - he certainly has learned it well. Just like his famous hip check - always devastating and well timed. Same can be said for the moves he has made and his ability to acquire the right player at the precise moment. He's not perfect but is light years above the guy the ducks hired.
The same Rob Blake whose team went 126 - 134 - 30 in his first four seasons as GM? THAT Rob Blake? The one who's apparently light years above the guy the Ducks hired?
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12 minutes ago, dtsdlaw said:
I think Verbeek's last chance will be this coming TDL. Many teams still are up against the cap and could use some help in acquiring players at lower cap hits, and since the Ducks will presumably be moving out Henrique, Lyubushkin, and perhaps Silfverberg, they'll be in a position to eat money and take some contracts back in exchange for more assets.
I absolutely agree that we should have done more during this flat cap era though. It coincided perfectly with the lowest years of our rebuild, and not using all three salary retention spots every season (we only used two last season) seems like a big waste to me when the team was built to suck anyway. I've also been frustrated at Verbeek's unwillingness to acquire "sweeteners" by taking on more cap dumps. For example, the Islanders sent a 2nd rounder to Chicago for eating one year of Josh Bailey's contract ($3.5M salary, which the Hawks promptly bought out). Arizona got a 2nd + 3rd + moved up 4 spots (32nd to 29th) in the 2022 1st round to eat one year of Zack Kassian ($2.3M salary). There are a handful of others like this, and its disappointing that the Ducks weren't in on some of these deals to get more assets for the future. I think that after this season, most teams will be in fine cap shape too, so it's unlikely that many teams will be looking for ways to get cap compliant for the next few seasons.
One thing I will say in defense of Verbeek is that it's possible the Samuelis nixed this approach. It's been...I don't want to use the word "reported" because I don't think I could back that up with quotes from Stephens unless I did digging that I don't have time for. But it's certainly been discussed quite a bit that the owners are not keen on dead money. They've done it in the past but sparingly, and that when the team was still trying to be competitive and presumably needed the cap and roster space to acquire players who could help them win. At a time when they're not competitive, they'll eat half of a contract to trade an expiring deal, but nothing else.
Dadanov was still a useful player when he was "acquired." McGinn isn't much of a player, but still has some usefulness. My point is that I would not be surprised at all if Verbeek is only allowed to acquire players using this method that he thinks can help the club (and I don't think "help the club" means help them lose). I don't think the Samuelis would be keen on the Josh Bailey move, for example.
We'll never know, of course, if that's the case. The Samuelis almost never talk to the press (and certainly not about stuff like this), and a GM isn't going to throw his owners under the bus by telling the media that his hands were tied. But I don't think, given their frugality, that it's unreasonable to suspect that the Samuelis might have eliminated the option to acquire a player and immediately buy him out.
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8 hours ago, g20topdogg said:
I think we've lost our chance to really use the cap to our advantage. We should have done more when we had the chance.
I don't disagree that we should have done more. However, I will point out that when Verbeek did try to use it, he was thwarted by Ottawa's incompetence. And it's nice of the league that they punished Ottawa, but didn't see fit to award the Ducks any compensation for Ottawa's blunder.
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1 hour ago, tommer-1 said:
Yeah, both are easily Ducks’ HOFers, but I don’t think either are HHOF guys. They might get in, but they are far from shoe-ins.
Without this incident, I would have said both would eventually make it. Both have pretty good resumes in the NHL and have the international hardware to boost their case. I'm a small Hall guy, so I would probably not have them in my personal HoF, but I think they're legitimate candidates.
(It's "shoo-in", by the way. Like you're shooing a fly.)
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27 minutes ago, Joker8 said:
When you are the bottom, there is No way but up.
I was there in 1993 I was there in 2007 I would like to see a team that compete and win. There are no awards for second all the way to last place.
So the 2003 season was a failure then? And 2015?
Of course I want the team to win the Cup every season. But I don't understand this notion that if you don't win the championship, the season is wasted or whatever. Maybe that's not what you're saying, but if so, please correct me because that's what it sounds like.
I have incredibly fond memories of the 2003 run to the Cup finals and the 2015 run to the conference finals. Those were great seasons that are not diminished because they didn't get all the way to finish line.
If you expect the team to win every season, the team would need to have unlimited resources. If you want the team to have unlimited resources, it would need to have different owners in a different market and be in a different league. Then it's not even the same team any more. Heck, it's probably not even playing the same sport.
And just to bring it back to this season - I'm enjoying it because it's a step forward. It looks like the team is on the right track. I have no idea if they'll get derailed at some point by bad management or coaching or player failure, but the team is playing better hockey for the first time in a while and I'm glad for that.
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16 minutes ago, Joker8 said:
So you are ok with losing? In the USA the Mecca of capitalism It's ok to lose money and games? The team could have traded the contacts the organization chose not to.
This is a zero sum game. Half the teams win more than they lose, half lose more than they win. Should all the owners of losing teams sell them?
Unless you're a masochist, no fan enjoys losing. But losing can be put in perspective if you look at the context. I was angry when the team continued to employ Bob Murray when it was clear he wasn't getting the job done in terms of getting them back on the path to winning. That was before I knew about the abusiveness.
Now I'm pleased that the team has hired new people who are trying different things to move the organization back towards winning. They're not there yet. Being mad at them is like being mad at a 5-year-old for not being able to dunk a basketball. They're just not there yet.
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12 minutes ago, Joker8 said:
Show me one team that won a championship on SOG percentage only, don't fool yourself.
That was basically the Kings calling card the two years they won the Cup. You shoot way more than your opponents, you score way more than your opponents. There are some teams that can mitigate this with very accurate shooters or great goaltending, but the general rule holds true.
Having much better shot generation and shot suppression is a major step forward for the team.
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Just now, BombaysTripleDeke said:
Is that somehow different from other teams? You don’t nearly have the time due to travel, games etc to be doing hard or extended practices on the road.
Two words: "ignore feature". It's a blessing.
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If you want to give up season tickets or give up your Ducks fandom, please feel free. I wouldn't stop you even if I could. It's your time and money. But the team is moving in the right direction, and this season has provided plenty of evidence of it.
Is Verbeek the GM who will lead the team back to the promised land? Is Cronin a good enough NHL head coach to get the team playing playoff hockey? If you've already answered those questions definitively in your mind, there's nothing I can say to keep you around. But I would argue it's far too soon to come to conclusions one way or the other. WAY too soon for Cronin, certainly. We have a larger body of evidence for Verbeek, and there's both good and disappointing there. I think there's still hope that he makes moves to get this team to contention, fighting for a playoff spot as soon as next year.
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2 minutes ago, Joker8 said:
You're calling the game vs. Colorado or Edmenton compete? When you lose 8 in a row, you are NOT Competing.
You have completely missed the point.
First, there were typos in my post for which I apologize. But when I said "there are bumps in the road as the team moves toward a level where they can compete," I am talking about competing for a playoff spot, for a division title, and for a Cup. That was never going to happen this year. If you thought otherwise, I'm sorry, but those were unreasonable expectations.
Second, if we're talking about "competing" in terms of working hard on a game to game basis, a losing streak doesn't necessarily have anything to do with that. Good teams can win without competing hard. Bad teams can compete hard and still lose. I have seen much more "compete" out of this team this season than in years past. Without it, we wouldn't have seen the comeback wins from earlier in the season.
There have been games that have gotten out of hand, and those are painful to watch. But if you've watched the last two games, you've seen a team working hard and outplaying two decent teams. They haven't gotten the results they want, but that's hockey. They've been good the last couple, and it bodes well for them ending this losing streak and getting back to winning from time to time.
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4 minutes ago, Joker8 said:
Nothing to learn, it is Ignorance on the management part. The ducks team is in a rebuild for the last 15 years, the kings did it in 3. We do not need any first round draft picks, trade Z+K for a proven player.
This is just incorrect. The Ducks were one of the best teams in the league from 2002 - 2018. That encompasses most of the last 15 years. In that 15 year stretch, they only missed the playoffs three times, they made two Cup finals (winning one), made two other conference finals, and won the division six times (including five in a row).
The Ducks have been in a rebuild for two years. Bob Murray tried to re-tool without tearing things down and failed utterly. It left Pat Verbeek with a lot of work to do to build a stable contender. That work is ongoing because it can't be done overnight (or even in two years). The Kings have two great players left (Kopitar and Doughty) from their glory days. The Ducks don't have any - Fowler was never as good as Doughty and Getzlaf faded before Kopitar. That means they're engaged in a much different type of rebuild than the Kings.
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This team is finally moving in the right direction under a new regime and we've got a bunch of fans who are already pull the plug.
Yes, there are bumps in the road as the time moves toward a level where they can compete, but that's the way this goes. Give it time.
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3 hours ago, dtsdlaw said:
The bolded seems like a legit possibility. Like, maybe the pendulum has swung really far in the other direction in Chicago so they're over-reacting to anything in an effort to try to remake their image. The Kyle Beach story came back on steroids this past summer when they won the Bedard sweepstakes, so they could be desperate to spit shine their turd of an organization before Bedard turns them into a winner again.
If it's Chicago over-reacting to a relatively minor incident, I would expect the NHLPA to get involved and defend Perry's contract. I don't know how long we need to wait to see if they'll file a grievance, but it seems they haven't done so yet, which indicates that whatever this thing is, it's legitimately bad.
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The rebuild has taken a lot longer than it should, but that's Bob Murray's fault. Verbeek has only had a year and a half. I expect the Ducks next season to be competing for a playoff spot. If they're not, that's a problem. But I don't see a reason not to expect them to get there.
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18 minutes ago, dtsdlaw said:
He's also 38-years-old and his body has been put through the ringer over a 1,469 NHL game career. Everyone seems to want to jump on the idea that this is something really nefarious and sexual since it involves the Blackhawks, but until we know something more concrete, we also have to consider that this could also be something more simple like an issue with painkillers. We know from Ryan Kesler that the Ducks had an issue with Torodol being overprescribed to players. So maybe the "team employee" that Perry had an issue with is just a team doctor who refused to write an Rx for painkillers.
It could be anything, right? I just hope for the best for all parties involved, and I'd hate to see Perry's HOF career marred by this final act.
I have no idea what this might be, but if it's drug related, I would expect the player assistance program to be involved. It could still be drugs and Perry is refusing to go through the program, but that's just one of infinite possibilities. The way everyone is treating this, I expect it's something worse.
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Trade & Free Agent Targets
in Rumors, Wishes and Speculations
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None. No thank you. The Ducks don't need a washed up malcontent.