Follow @james_tanner123 If the Washington Capitals are any indication, the NHL is an all-or nothing league.
I'm not going to rehash the Crosby vs Ovechkin debate, but I do think Ovechkin gets undersold. To score as he has done in his career, to do so in basically the lowest scoring era ever, is amazing, and it would be more widely acknowledged if he had also have won a Stanley Cup, or even an Olympic Gold.
The guy basically scores goals at the same rate Wayne Gretzky did, but he happens to have never won a championship in a team sport, so he gets incredibly short changed. The Capitals have won three President's trophies in Ovechkin's career and even though this is arguably a harder thing to do, he gets zero credit for it.
Crosby actually gets hailed for winning Olympic Gold, despite the fact that if you took him and the next five best players off his stacked team, they'd have still had the best team by a mile. Ovechkin is supposed to will the Russians - who are dressing players that wouldn't make a third Canadian team - to victory to get credit? It's total BS.
The point is that 99% of fans don't care how good you are unless a) you play for their team or b) you have won the championship. The NHL is an all-or-nothing league, and whether or not that's OK isn't my point - it's the reality.
The concepts of "rebuilding" and being "patient" are outdated. The salary cap has made it so. Draft picks are crazy overrated.
It used to be that you would rebuild through the draft over several seasons. The fabled "Five Year Plan" that people used to talk about.
But in a salary cap league, that plan is a loser. The best way to give yourself the best chance to win is to get value against the cap, and underpay players so you can have more good players than the other teams.
That's basically what the "game" of being a GM is. In order to do this, you have to have players on entry-level deals who are capable of playing to a star-level.
If you have a couple of really high-end 20 year olds, you can then pay for players to augment your roster with all the extra salary cap space. For example, there are players in the NHL who make $9 million against the cap next year who will bring less to their team than Auston Matthews will for around $1 million. (There are bonuses, and maybe it costs three million, but I believe you can also push them to the next season if you want to. Either way, it's still a 60% savings, at worst).
This is why the Arizona Coyotes need to go all in.
To recap:
No one cares if you're second place or 31st.
Most teams lose anyways.
Most teams will go decades without ever winning.
The Cap Situation demands it.
As the team with one of the best - if not the best - prospect systems in the NHL, the Coyotes need to just go crazy. The Toronto Maple Leafs proved last year that if you give a bunch of rookies a chance, they'll do fine. The only thing stopping more 18 year olds from being good in the NHL is teams giving them a chance.
But for the Coyotes, due to their patience, don't even have a bunch of 18 year old - most of their prospects are now 20 or so.
They have Raanta, a potentially great goalie.
They have a good set of veterans who are in their prime (or close enough) - Raanta, Stepan, OEL, Hjallmarsson, Goligoski.
And most of all, they have tons of cap space.
$20 Million of it.
And tons of assets, and all their future draft picks.
The Coyotes should take their next three or four first rounders and put them in play with Richardson, Reider, and a few prospects Like Fischer or Perlini and see what they can get.
They should abandon all traditional building philosophies and go all in, right now. Today.
Stepan, Domi, Duclair, Perlini, Dvorak, Strome, Keller, Martinhook - that's eight really good forwards, and Clayton Keller is going to be an absolute superstar.
Their defense has quietly become one of the better ones in the NHL.
Chychrun as a #4 and Schenn/Clendenning is an alright bottom pairing. But the top two are elite, and most teams don't have that.
Are you really gonna tell me that with $20 million and a handful of draft picks and B prospects that you couldn't make this team into a contender? With so many teams in cap trouble? With people treating your draft picks like they're gold? When your needs aren't a #1 defenseman or a #1 goalie or a #1 centre? (The three hardest things to get).
The Coyotes need defensive forwards, scoring wingers, and depth defensemen. With twenty-Mill and some draft picks, you can get some good upgrades.
Come on. This might sound far fetched, but I assure you, it's not. You can methodically build your team with a destination in mind that will likely never come to pass, or you can go all in. The best thing, is if you fail, you can sell of what you have, spend a year selling off your cap space for assets, draft high and do the whole thing over again in another three years.
We are entering the age of the hyper rebuild and it won't end unless the NHL shuts down and makes teams pay rookies a fair salary. They won't, because established players will always sell the rookies down the stream. This is the new NHL. The Coyotes should strike while the iron is hot and every team isn't practicing this strategy.
By the time they do things the "right way" Domi will cost six million dollars. OEL will maybe have to go to a new team. Stepan and M.C Hammer will be in their thirties. Goligoski will need a new hip.
Go all in.
The rewards are great and the cost is nothing. If you lose, what happens? The Coyotes don't win and no one respects them? That'd wouldn't be much different from the last twenty years.
John Chayka, are you listening? Bring me the 2017-18 Stanley Cup.