Friday Caps Clips: Development Camp Day Five

Pretty good top 5

1 1 Pittsburgh Mario Lemieux F Laval Voisins [QMJHL]
1 2 New Jersey Kirk Muller C Guelph Platers [OHL]
1 3 Chicago Ed Olczyk C U.S. National Team [Intl]
1 4 Toronto Al Iafrate D Belleville Bulls [OHL] 799
1 5 Mtl. Canadiens Petr Svoboda D Czechoslovakia Jr.

Impressive class – that’s 700+ NHL games out of each of the first four picks. Wonder how many times that has happened.

Right; overlooked that, and my bad.

So do you pay Parise more or less than this?

The only way I see the players accepting this is if they can bring down the escrow. Escrow payments have been well over double digits, correct?

Maybe the PA will eventually agree to take a step back (though 25% is pretty drastic) and reason that in time revenues will make the cap grow — just as it did from 2005-2010. But if they can guarantee what’s in their contracts is closer to what they’ll actually take home, perhaps it’ll be a manageable pill to swallow.

Easy for me to theorize though, not as if I’m going to cut my own paycheck by a quarter. That wouldn’t pay my dog food bill for a month!

Dumb of me, should have realized that they were signing bonuses and not performance-based. That cools me on the contract significantly, but I still like it.

As far as foundational pieces go, Koivu’d end up as one, sure as hell, so the non-foundational part doesn’t bother me. I could deal with a goalie carousel for that kind of quality up front, especially with the current lack of depth – we do have a goalie pipeline and there are goalies to be had for reasonable prices now.

Given Green’s offensive numbers, we may end up with a choice between him and Carlson regardless of another large contract on the team. He’s going to get some serious FA offers if he gets to market and evem if he doesn’t, extending him is going to be very, very expensive.

Someone who isn’t in a car driving through Delaware, or knows off te top of their head – are RAHJC and MG52 up for renewal at the same time? If so and Green gets a large extension before he hits the market, does that not open the door for a Hjalmersson-style offer sheet on Carlson, only more expensive?

I think the Caps are faced with some tough personnel decisions coming up, regardless of any additional contracts. Good problem to have, to be sure, but a problem none the less.

I don’t believe so. Rick DiPietro’s deal is insured (indeed, getting it “short enough” for insurance was the big stumbling block). Contracts even have to get insured for AO to go play international hockey.

I can think of two someones…

But it doesn’t fit Russo’s narrative…

Fletcher’s got to figure out a way to find a scorer for Koivu. But unless there’s significant unloading of salaries, the Wild’s going to have to build this scorer from within.

He points to the players developed from within — Ovechkin, Malkin, Crosby, Datsyk, etc. If that’s your model, then at least one of three things is going to have to happen for Minnesota. First, they could find that scorer among propsects who have not yet displayed a slam-dunk promise to be that player (Latendresse (even if he came from outside)? Granlund?… neither appear yet to be such slam dunks). That player might be a year or two away from being a productive partner, and that fits in the sweet spot of Koivu’s contract when he will be in his prime.

Second, they could suck, hit the jackpot (i.e., win the lottery) and get the top-of-the-line talent that fits with an Ovechkin, a Malkin, a Datsyuk. If that was to happen in the next year or two, that player would be a productive partner for Koivu early in his career, again, with Koivu in the prime years of his contract.

Third, they could muddle along in the 10-20 draft slots and perhaps get and perhaps end up with a talent comparable to an Anze Kopitar (an 11th overall pick) or a Zach Parise (17th overall), or even an Alexander Semin (13th overall). There would likely be be some years before that player became a productive partner for Koivu (Granlund is a 9th overall pick).

And that where one gets to the problem with the indispensable player that (for that particular franchise) has to be signed. Koivu does not yet have that partner who can assume the goal scoring load or the more purely offensive perspective that he seems disinclined to assume. Unfortunately, time is linear here. If the Wild are to build this resource from within, and Granlund isn’t it, then that resource is going to have to come from some future draft while Koivu’s contract is running. The effect is to “waste” (as a lot of folks in Caps Nation thought of Ovechkin) the early years of his contract, and there is no certainty that the Wild will ever be able to develop that talent from within.

I don’t disagree with the argument that the draft should be the strongest leg of the player development platform. Unfortunately, the rarely spoken about rebar in that leg is a team sucking enough to get a really high pick to be the “elite” player that drives a contender. The players Russo noted, with the exception of the Red Wings Datsyuk and Zetterberg, and the Devils’ Parise, all were top-three picks. And if Minnesota is not going to suck — if they are going to muddle along in that 10-20 drafting area, consider this. No player taken in the 2008 or 2009 drafts by the Wild have yet played a game in the NHL, and only one player taken in 2007 has played in more than 10 games, none of them in the 2009-2010 season (Colton Gillies, taken 16th). That might be unexpected, considering that Minnesota had only one top-20 pick (a 16th overall in 2009 — Nick Leddy). But the point is that if you are drafting in that middle third area of the first round consistently — not getting that top five pick for an elite player — you are going to be looking at long lead times just to bring a player to the NHL, let alone have him be a productive partner for your top income player.

In the end, I don’t think Minnesota is going to be able to build enough around Koivu from within to justify this contract, not unless they really suck somewhere along the way (and sooner rather than later). That strategy will have to undergo some tweaking.

Even though he doesn’t fill a great need, I’m down with Flash for Clutterbuck.

/Wing’d

Bless you

Or that Koivu is the superior defensive player. And specials teams player. And doesn’t take bad PIMs. And Koivu was more consistent.

The Sedin point is probably the most relevant, but there’s really no lens that makes Burrows look like the better player.

I don’t think he actually realizes anything about hockey. Ever. Andy Sutton would be disgusted that he writes as an authority.

A: I have a contract [for this season]. I don’t lose sleep at night because my salary is X amount of dollars when I think it should be Y amount of dollars. I lose sleep at night because I’ve been in the league five years and we still haven’t won a championship. I wake up in the middle night frustrated because we lost out in the first round and I want to see our players hoist the Stanley Cup i cant remember this girl’s name. That’s why I lose sleep. I don’t worry about 13 months from now not having a paycheck. That’s a long time from now.

Generally I go with the Swede every time, but I have to stick with my guy here!

Anyway, I think it’s kinda silly that these decisions are being “made” before pro camp has even started.

True. And he has bought some time