VM1138

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Well, well, well.  Columbus is doing a little house cleaning.  Howson has been a pretty bad GM, there's really no doubt about that.  Replacing him can only be good for them, right?  Columbus has a little bit of talent, nothing great to build around, and the next GM is going to have a heckuva time rebuilding.  On the one hand, it could be fun, but on the other, the job would be so difficult starting from scratch, I don't envy whoever the replacement is.

This is a pretty random topic, but it's always kind of nagged at me. Why do sportscasters and writers include previous cities as part of a franchise? For instance, when talking about historical records, Winnipeg is always included as part of the Phoenix Coyotes, which makes the Coyotes seem to have been around much longer than in reality. Same goes for Minnesota and Dallas. A lot of the time players and front office go with the team, but once it gets a new name and gets a new identity, I feel like it shouldn't be included with the old team's stats.

Now, in my mind, when a team changes cities and changes names, it starts fresh. If the North Stars had won the Cup, you wouldn't include it with the Cups Dallas has won and so forth.

Anyone else have an opinion on this admittedly unimportant detail?

So I meandered over to the LA Kings HF boards and look through some of their topics to see what they were saying about their first ever cup win.

There's little activity over there yet, but I found a few comments that specifically said they would not be a "one and done" team, that Quick should get a 7+ million dollar contract, and some optimism about the future.

But as we've seen, it takes a very special team to return to the finals (Wings and Pens are the most recent to do so, and they were awesome teams).  LA certainly has the youth factor and some very good teams, but I can't shake the feeling that, despite how well they played, this year was a fluke. The whole playoff scene was topsy turvy and I just don't see that holding up next year.

Does anyone have any thoughts on where LA is going in the future?  I personally think they will be a playoff team next year but I just don't see them going very far for quite a while.

The other thing I found interesting is that their success hinged on Quick's performance.  Goalies are notoriously inconsistent.  There hasn't been a truly great goalie in the NHL since the early 2000s, except for maybe Lundqvist.  If they do end up sinking 7 million in him, in my mind they will be committing a classic mistake.  I'm not sure what their cap situation is moving forward but a move like that certainly won't help.  Too many teams have awarded their goalies with huge contracts only to have them become an albatross around the team.