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Wings were #1 seeds from 94 to 96 with 0 Finals wins to show for it. 99 to 01 was 3 more years of underachieving before Bowman was gifted the best team to ever be assembled to win his last Cup as HC in 02. Bowman had just as many disappointing seasons as Babcock, despite having more talent to win with. Not happening. Too many close teams geographically and another conference realignment.

I want Tippett and Hague

Im more of a fan of rewarding the guys that play great both ways (Rasmussen) than handing out big money to guys that hurt us 5 on 5 (Debrincat, Raymond). If Debrincat carried a cost of 4 mil per, I'd say it would be worth the risk to take on his MINUS 31 5on5 play. But he's going to cost Larkin type money, so "No, Thanks." Tarasenko and O'Reilly are better options for us.

As a 19 yo with a 19yo body he scored almost 60 pts. He’s clearly a good player. He just can’t be the only scoring winger we have.

I respect everyone's opinions on this. But I'm prepared to throw down over this. Or at least rant a bit. My opinion: We need scoring punch in the worst way, and we've needed it in the worst way for the better part of a decade, and we've had all these draft picks and all these prospects and all these free agent opportunities and all these trade opportunities......... .........yet somehow we still desperately need scoring punch. I wanted Matthew Tkachuk. "Too expensive," people said. OK. Fair enough. But if you want a bigger, grittier, more complete version of DeBrincat, you're basically looking for a unicorn - unless you want to pay out the ass, or unless you get really lucky in the draft. I think the time's come for us to get serious about really, truly moving forward. I love David Perron - but I hate that he's one of our top two wingers at this stage of the rebuild. It's unacceptable to me. We've got a lot of good young players in our system right now, that's true. And that's good. And we'll need them to be good. And they probably will be good. But there's no rule that says we can't trade for other teams' young players. We can sit here and say "Nah, f*** this goal-scoring punk. If he REALLY wants to be a Wing, he'll sit out for a year and wait until free agency next summer." And we can watch that ship sail away. And that will be the 415th ship we've watched sail away since the start of this rebuild - because "Nah it just didn't make sense for us, given where we're at. I'd rather we do the other thing [which we won't end up doing]." And we can spend another year losing close games because we can't score goals. Or......................... ...............we can say "F*** the police" and grab the 25-year-old right-shooting goal-scoring winger right now and sign him to a big deal and take our chances with that investment. "But do you really want to chance it?" Yes, I do. We have all the cap flexibility an organization could ever want. All the money in the Bertuzzi fund can now be used for other stuff. All the money in the Vrana fund can now be used for other stuff. And we also have draft capital. "Yeah, but our young guys are going to start eating up cap space really quickly." Maybe they will, maybe they won't. What I care about now is getting solid footing. Tangible things. Known things. Alex DeBrincat has scored 40 goals twice. He's a natural scorer. He can and will put up points. These are known things. I don't want to go through the motions for another 82 games and accept that we don't need to ice the best damned lineup we can ice "because it's just not time yet. I think we need at least one more really good draft." We've been saying "We just need one more really good draft" for the past 500 years. Enough already! If we can land DeBrincat without giving up our 1st, I think that's a major coup. Pick a name out of a hat for that pick. Let's call it Nate Danielson. If we land DeBrincat and Nate Danielson, I think that's bloody fantastic. All of a sudden we're talking about Larkin, Kasper, Danielson, Veleno down the middle. All of a sudden we're talking about flanking those guys with DeBrincat, Raymond, Mazur, et al. I don't want to wait a second longer than we have to on taking the next step. I don't want to rush it, but I do want to push it. I don't want our young leaders to grow any more accustomed to losing than they already are. We need to start winning games. We need to start doing that whole "winning culture" thing now - not two or three years from now. So. Give me a proven scorer. Who's 25 years old. And who shoots right. And who's from Detroit. [/rant]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CtB0LwFgHrJ/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Lidstrom was hurt in game 5, and he played the s*** out of him on a pulled groin. That was a mistake. I might have done the same cuz Nick F'ing Lidstrom, but it hurt us.

Not likely - however there’s been talk about another round of expansion - Salt Lake City and Atlanta…