Jason Lewis: The Limited Options in Defensive Right/Left Balance

Greene got bought out. Nice read.

We need to move or if possible amnesty Brown.. His contract is an albatross, and is inhibiting the team from adding to needed areas with any available quality players..

amnesty buyouts ended...

with greene gone, LAK still have scuderi on the books for another year. schenn's hero chart looks slightly better than polak, but what's the price tag?

even an open minded sutter wont go into the season rolling the dice on forbort/gravel as the bottom pair, even knowing how limiting scuderi and/or whoever said RHD will be.

with buyouts, i believe there's 2.4mm in dead cap money tied up for the next four years, but i may be reading generalfanager.com wrong...

*yawn* wake me up when the kings address their issues

Greene got bought out. Nice read.
- Ersberg

Yea edit incoming. Happened after I posted. And I have been at work.
Figures right?

With Greene most likely gone, plus the potential to have a very minor cap hit IF Scuderi is sent down (I don't think that will happen), what about Demers? That would clear enough space for a RHD who is a decent puck mover and only 28 years old.

With Greene most likely gone, plus the potential to have a very minor cap hit IF Scuderi is sent down (I don't think that will happen), what about Demers? That would clear enough space for a RHD who is a decent puck mover and only 28 years old.
- Regulate

demers is one of few RHD on the UFA market...would imagine his price/term will be higher than palatable.

and Dean wants to keep him...

http://espn.go.com/nhl/st...gs-unhappy-loss-captaincy

Yea edit incoming. Happened after I posted. And I have been at work.
Figures right?
- Jason_Lewis

I can relate. I read about it just after you posted. Within minutes.

The thin UFA market is why I, personally, would trade a defenseman. It sounds counter-intuitive, but maximizing return is about selling high and exploiting the market. Seeing how EDM was desperate for defense and just traded star Taylor Hall for Adam Larsson leads one to imagine what some GM out there would pay to get his hands on Muzzin or Martinez, but particularly Muzzin, who some people apparently believe is a top-10 defenseman.

It should be possible to get a young, blue-chip, RHD blueliner who's either NHL-ready or already partly established, possibly plus something else decent. You'd be trading a LHD (which, as the article notes, the team has too many of), freeing up $4M in cap space (to spend elsewhere), getting a much-needed RHD back and getting younger. It would address a slew of issues.

Alas, though Lombardi is showing the courage to make tough decisions this offseason (case in point, Greene today), I don't see him having the stomach to take a gamble and revamp the defense in this way. He'll most likely just plug in journeymen (like the ones suggested in the article) to the existing group again and we'll debate for another season why the results are underwhelming.

The thin UFA market is why I, personally, would trade a defenseman. It sounds counter-intuitive, but maximizing return is about selling high and exploiting the market. Seeing how EDM was desperate for defense and just traded star Taylor Hall for Adam Larsson leads one to imagine what some GM out there would pay to get his hands on Muzzin or Martinez, but particularly Muzzin, who some people apparently believe is a top-10 defenseman.

It should be possible to get a young, blue-chip, RHD blueliner who's either NHL-ready or already partly established, possibly plus something else decent. You'd be trading a LHD (which, as the article notes, the team has too many of), freeing up $4M in cap space (to spend elsewhere), getting a much-needed RHD back and getting younger. It would address a slew of issues.

Alas, though Lombardi is showing the courage to make tough decisions this offseason (case in point, Greene today), I don't see him having the stomach to take a gamble and revamp the defense in this way. He'll most likely just plug in journeymen (like the ones suggested in the article) to the existing group again and we'll debate for another season why the results are underwhelming.
- Osprey

Bold moves are something I love to see from GMs.

Bold moves are something I love to see from GMs.
- Jason_Lewis

bold would be good...unless that means dean wants to sign an aging player to a longer term than anyone else will...

oh and please no kris russell or polak. i'd rather take a flier on a cheap 1 year deal on wisniewski than overpay for those two.

Man I would have taken a shot at E.Staal at 3.5mil. Looks like everybody around is improving again. I hope Dean can make something happen.

huh. Tom Gilbert

LA Times is reporting that Greene was put on waivers, but isn't being bought out.

Bold move there getting Gilbert.... so Bold it don't even get mentioned in the tracker

LA Times is reporting that Greene was put on waivers, but isn't being bought out.
- tkecanuck341

I think if they were able to get a deal with Looch then they would have bought out Greene. Now I think a buyout is going to depend on who else they can sign. Players are getting picked up fast.

Bold moves are something I love to see from GMs.
- Jason_Lewis

Kudos for seeing the rationale behind my argument, even if you probably disagree with my particular proposal.

I was just reading the following quote from Lombardi from shortly after the team was eliminated:

"Secondly, which is most crippling, is once you’ve had success, there’s a tendency – and remember the statement where somebody had told me, one of those guys who had won – they said, ‘you can’t recreate, you have to reinvent.’ And now I get it. And so you can’t approach things saying, ‘this worked in the past, and all we’ve got to do is go back and do it this way again and we’ll recapture it,’ and I think what this season clearly demonstrated, that’s clearly not the case, and there’s a reason why. Your players are different. Your economics are different. Your spiritual chemistry’s different, and you stop striving to take the next step. So all the innovation and spark that we had when we were building this, there’s a tendency to flatline because ‘we figured it out, we don’t have to do anything different, anything better, and we know it all,’ and it stagnates."

I love hearing this from Lombardi. That said, I'm not sure if he's really ready to follow through. So far, the only thing that he's really changed is the captaincy. He's brought back Sutter, re-signed Lewis, is keeping Greene and has added only depth defensemen. I'm not necessarily criticizing those moves if there are bold moves elsewhere, but, so far, it's rather looking like he's bringing back the same team to give the approach that worked in the past another chance, which appears to go against the new outlook that he says that he wants to take. Maybe he has larger things up his sleeve, but it's rather underwhelming so far.

Bold move there getting Gilbert.... so Bold it don't even get mentioned in the tracker



- MikeOxbyg

It was on TSN's free agency tracker along time ago.