Dabura

- I dunno. Where did we find him? - We don't necessarily need a man-for-man, point-for-point, pound-for-pound, one-to-one replacement, especially if we're mainly talking regular-season production. - "Where are we going to find someone who can put 25-30 goals in the net for his pricetag" Vs. "Where are we going to find someone who can score in the playoffs (and 1. consistently, 2. in the clutch)?

Hugely underrated? By us? Flip?

Are you a robot?

Filppula will be our big UFA pickup. The crystal 8 ball has foreseen it.

All the leaves are brown And the sky is gray

A part of me was hoping Helm would get it. But this is the right call.

Re: booing Bettman, Ha. Yeah. Sure. That'll show him. No. He deserves something special. I'm thinking 30 flying octopi raining down on him all at once.

+1 I'd rather it be St. Helena. But then there's that whole submarine rescue thing.

Apparently Babs asked Saint Nick for one more run. http://kuklaskorner.com/a2y/comments/uncle-mike-asked-tph-to-honcho-hike-to-12 Apologies if this has been mentioned before and/or it's not true. _________________________ After all the talk about the importance of drafting and building from within and bringing players up from the farm, and the days of stocking your top lines and pairings with quality FA pickups being over, and...(etc. ad nauseam)

I'm gonna be pretty sour if Mikael Samuelsson bumps Nyquist out of Detroit.

We're getting Smith full-time. This'll have to do.

Strap Pierre Maguire.to a rocket and fire him to the moon.

Buy out Ian White's mouth.

Overpaying defiitely is the norm now, but I still think Holland paid a bit too much for Tootoo. Beyond that, though, I've loved the signing from the moment I learned of it. And yeah - no one (certainly not Holland) is going to buy out a player acquired right before the lockout. And even if Holland were keen on the idea, I think he'd dig into his own piggy bank if it meant keeping Our Lord and Savior, Mikael Samuelsson. Colaiacovo is always injured. Alllllllways. I think that's worth considering. If Holland wants to send a message, shake things up, he ships Franzen. Regular season production means nothing in the postseason. I'm fairly certain he'll be a Wing for life, though. For better or for worse. Bertuzzi's one of my favorites on this team, but, admittedly, that has more to do with his character 'n' such than the stuff that really matters re: winning in the playoffs.

Holland overpaid for Tootoo, but, honestly, I think the guy's gonna be even more important now, with the shortened season, than he would've been with the full 82. Why? Because we're insanely soft and insanely injury-prone - and that's under normal, non-post-lockout circumstances, when everyone's (supposed to be) in top shape. I'm fully expecting at least half of our top-sixers to go down within the first five games. Off-topic, but...is the site formatting all screwed up for anyone else?

Is Carlo Colaiacovo the most injury-prone player in NHL history?

Orgasmic.

Was going to say more or less what you've said here. At this point, I'm pointing the finger at Bettman.

I think the best "evidence" we've gotten is Iron Mike's (possibly apocryphal) anecdote about "Mr. Illitch" and, who was it, the Panthers' owner/GM at the time? Something like that. Point being: yeah.

Oh, hey. Parity. Awesome.

Oh, please.

Don't get me wrong - when non-hockey fans ask me who's really at fault in all of this, I say the owners and Bettman. That's the immediate truth. But I do think this lockout seems to part of a "bigger picture" dealy, what with Proskauer-Rose having its grubby fingers in all four league pies, and the similarities in the "lockout scripts," and Bettman being a P-R alumnus, and Bob Batterman slowly replacing Daly as Bettman's BFF, etc.

And yet, does anyone really miss Hudler?

Anything to change the course of our history so that we don't become the pansy-ass patty-cake playmakers club that we are today. Did we learn nothing from the latter half of the 90s?

Y'know, I think everything that needs to be said can be said in two words: Proskauer-Rose.