Blob Mckenzie wrote: ↑Sat Jan 04, 2025 8:45 pm
Can you dumb it down a bit and say what your roster construction concerns are? Or perhaps elaborate your thoughts on the brevity of the window...
By Blobular request:
The two ideas are related in that the resulting brevity of the window has been, and remains, my principle concern with the roster construction. My underlying assumption is that if a team is to have a significant and sustained shot at a championship, management needs to set up a roster so that the talent is concentrated over a specific period of time.
Mëds wrote: ↑Sat Jan 04, 2025 5:31 pm
When I look at our current roster.....
Miller
Pettersson
Boeser
Hughes
Hronek
Demko
Are the core players.
I think most would agree, so let's go with that interpretation of the core.
Demko was a brilliant draft pick, and has played great for the Canucks. He was one of the top 3 goalies in the world for significant stretches.
But he was damaged goods coming out of the draft, needing hip surgery before he could join the Canucks. That might even be why he was available at that draft position. The surgery was success, so that part of the gamble paid off, but another reasonably foreseeable consequence was that he might not have the career length of most other goalies of equal calibre, and that's looking like it's coming to pass.
Boeser was another great draft pick. But while we include him in the core because of his talent level, does anyone on this board think that he is more than a complementary piece? He has shown no ability to drive play on his own. I would accept the argument that you need a player like this on a championship team, but he’s also not someone you can build around. And at 28, he is probably getting near the end of his peak competitive window, too.
Miller has been a great player for the Canucks, but I have always had trouble with the timing of the acquisition. (It doesn’t seem we can search the archives anymore, but I expect that some of you remember.) Trading a draft pick for a player who can help now is a perfectly sensible thing to do as one enters the competitive window, but it seemed to me to be premature when it was done. Now soon to be 32, he has entered the phase of his career when we expect most forwards to decline. Some might say it’s already started.
So while those were all good players, previous management set the Canucks up for a brief window by taking a long time to assemble the talent, and consciously including an older player. Two of those players –- one from Benning’s first season of draft picks, and one acquired in place of a draft pick -- might already have missed that window.
Current management, for its part, has responded to that challenge by trying to make the most of this window, rather than to extend it. I have no trouble believing that they were under orders from ownership in this regard, but it appears that they are in win now mode.
One way this shows up is in the trade for core member
Hronek. If you believe that the Canucks are in their peak competitive phase, then spending draft capital to acquire core member Hronek makes sense. Hronek can reasonably be expected to continue to be effective through a few of the most productive years of the youngest members of the core, but he can also be reasonably expected to decline and retire before they do.
The other manifestation of this apparent plan to make the most of any existing window is passing on any opportunity to get anything like maximum return on the declining assets described above.
So that's two-thirds of the acknowledged core. The remainders,
Pettersson and
Hughes, are spectacularly talented players who probably still have quite a lot of top career years in front of them, but they have their limitations, too, which impose some constraints on the rest of the roster construction. Some of Pettersson’s limitations have been the focus of recent parts of this topic.
All the other teams in the League have their roster challenges, too, but right now, about half of them are winning more often that the Canucks are.
That doesn't strike me as a very promising competitive window.