Dabura

I Liked This, not gonna lie.

I'm more mourning the fall of cosmic justice than saying, "Oh, sure, realistically, the Wild are the most obvious pick for this season's Cup champs."

No sarcasm. The way things go in this league today, "parity"-wise and such, I'm guessing the Wild bought themselves a Cup this summer (if not this season, then the next one, or one in the very near future).

Guess the Cup isn't All That to him. But then, we already knew that.

I dunno. If we're not adding any big-name forwards, he should at least be able to compete for a spot at camp, IMHO.

They'll probably win the Cup this year.

Because It's The Cup.

Capgeek is so depressing now.

Oh, come on.

No. Rinne's not even all that much better than Howard. He's the size of an elephant, and we were shooting from the perimeter.

I'm sorry to be a broken record, but - Semin would not go a long way in helping. He's not physical; you won't see him mucking it up in the corners or crashing the crease. He's not D-minded; you won't see him busting his balls on the backcheck - and that's if you see him backcheck at all. He's not really high-intensity. His work ethic, his commmitment are highly questionable. On being boxed out by a big, physial, defense-oriented team in their zone, he, like all of our current "scorers," will settle for low-percentage perimeter shots. He might have more success with this than our current guys; he has a blistering shot. But really, it'd be more of the same. Our top-6 needs some new ingredients, a new dimension or two or three or four.

Our F and D S*** the B. The really sad/funny/painful thing is, shooting from the perimeter was not an altogether terrible strategy, since Rinne gift-wrapped about 4,000 glorious rebound opportunities for us. Somehow, though, we failed to get to any and all of them (give or take a couple). Absolutely ludicrous.

Ryan or Nash (for the record, I'd much prefer Ryan) would probably cost something like Filppula/Franzen + Nyquist + a good prospect + a 1st-round pick. We'd be losing a lot, yes, but you have to give a lot to gain a lot - and we would be gaining a lot. Like I said, our top-6 needs to be more dynamic, more dangerous. As things currently stand, we are far from deadly - because we can be completely shut down. Any scoring unit that can be snuffed out like ours was against the Preds is not going to win the Stanley Cup - and the goal is the Cup, anything short of it being a disappointing failure for this great organization. Franzen scored all of one goal, and it was a total fluke. He was uninspired, undisciplined. Filppula scored zero goals and was barely noticeable, let alone dangerous. I don't care about his regular-season stats, they mean jack - especially if he doesn't produce in the playoffs. Are Nash and Ryan proven playoff performers? No. Do I think Flip is a playoff bust? No. Do I think we desperately need a power-forward? Yes. Do I think adding one (or two, if you count Doan) power-forwards would make us more formidable, even though we'd be giving up Flip or Franzen? Yes. Players like Filppula are rare. Players like Bobby Ryan are just as rare, if not more so. We can only acquire a player like Ryan via free agency or a trade. Flip, we may have one or two younger hims waiting in the wings (no pun intended), and I don't think he's so special that we'll never be able to draft another player like him. Moreover, we have Datsyuk and Zetterberg, who are - while, yes, older - basically better versions of him. It is, I think, a low-risk, high-reward trade (assuming it's more or less like the package I put forward at the beginning of this post).

Our top-6 was boxed out to the perimeter in the o-zone. Our secondary scoring dried up. Our bottom-6 was a joke. We need a shot in the arm, some new looks our top-6 can throw the opposition. We need a guy who's not going to get boxed out to the perimeter and be content to take bottom-basement-percentage shots from the tops of the circles against a physically huge, world-class goalie like Rinne (though I do think he's not a little overrated). We need to get a little bigger, a little stronger, a little faster, a little nastier. Obviously we need more goals, but I'm not sure adding a sniper like Semin is really the answer. He'd be more than content to take shots from outside the box; he wouldn't really give us a new dimension. We'd still be forced to play the Predators' game. A guy like Bobby Ryan or Rick Nash (pipe dream) or Corey Perry (pipe dream) or Milan Lucic (pipe dream) will do what no one in our top-6 does (at least, not consistently): break through the box, drive to the net, crash and bang in the corners - cause problems. Oh yeah - and score. And in doing so, he'd free up things a bit, give our skilled guys more time and space. That, in turn, would give us a chance to take over with our style of game. At the very least, it'd disrupt the opposition's system. Calm your ass down, buddy. I'll answer all your burning questions.

See: our embarrassing five-game first-round defeat at the hands of Little Brother.

I have decided this thread is cruel. Because, come on. We are not landing Rick Nash.

He did score in the Preds series.

Damn, Semin pretending to be kipwinger in the lazy Russians thread, and now Dom Hasek is trolling it up.

To be fair, he's pretty much had to carry the team on his back his whole career thus far.

Nice try, Semin. I can smell your laziness from here, through the internet. Now, what have you done with kipwinger? Is he safe?

Doan at age 60 would be 25 times more valuable to this team.

Where have you been all my life?

Trade for Ryan now, use him to seduce one (or both?!?!?!?) of Perry and Getzlaf to sign here next summer.

Bangarang.

Why wouldn't he be content? We got our top-6 goal-scoring machine and our top-4 rock. We're solid and set re: secondary scoring. Our bottom-6 looks to be much bigger, tougher, younger, faster - altogether much harder to play against.