Trade: Ryan O'Reilly to St Louis Blues

[Doohicksie]

... waive/trade guys who don't contribute anyhthing.

 

They did it with Matty Mo.  I think others are coming.  But you also to consider what any moves will do to your salary cap.  If you have a couple of toxic contracts it could be better to just let them expire than to pay on them for years.

 

As the last place team in the league, just who are we going dump cap on?  The reason we're taking on these contracts is that we can.  When more of the youth comes up for their contracts we will be more limited in the moves we can make, but for now, the contracts aren't hurting us too badly.

[pi2000]

Kane was a problem.

SJ doesn't seem to think so. Or are you saying you trust a rookie GM more than a GM of a perennial Cup contender?

[bob_sauve28]

Well, we've definitely been patient

 

Trading him away makes sense. Trading him for garbage does not

Garbage?? ROR was a 2nd round pick and we got two firsts and a second for him. Odds are--and this is all about playing the odds--we win this trade in the long run. He is 27 and will be over 30 by the time we make our run for the cup.

[LGR4GM]

SJ doesn't seem to think so. Or are you saying you trust a rookie GM more than a GM of a perennial Cup contender?

No I am telling you I was told by someone with knowledge that Kane needed to go. 

[bob_sauve28]

They did it with Matty Mo.  I think others are coming.  But you also to consider what any moves will do to your salary cap.  If you have a couple of toxic contracts it could be better to just let them expire than to pay on them for years.

 

As the last place team in the league, just who are we going dump cap on?  The reason we're taking on these contracts is that we can.  When more of the youth comes up for their contracts we will be more limited in the moves we can make, but for now, the contracts aren't hurting us too badly.

That's right, this is all about timing.

[shrader]

They did it with Matty Mo.  I think others are coming.  But you also to consider what any moves will do to your salary cap.  If you have a couple of toxic contracts it could be better to just let them expire than to pay on them for years.

 

As the last place team in the league, just who are we going dump cap on?  The reason we're taking on these contracts is that we can.  When more of the youth comes up for their contracts we will be more limited in the moves we can make, but for now, the contracts aren't hurting us too badly.

 

And typically the teams that are taking on the cap hits are from guys who they don't actually have to pay.  So for that, you're either retaining salary in a deal or you've got a LTIR or retired guy.  We don't have any candidates for the latter right now... well, at least until Bogosian plays a few more games.

[Doohicksie]

Did y'all notice sizzlemeister is back?

 

Yep.  I had to check his Display Name history, but I noticed him....

[jahnyc]

One? Kane was gone anyway and we got a first round pick for him.

 

ROR has brought three young players any one of whom could be good or all of them could be good. This is a young league, better to have lots of youth in the pipeline.

 

One current prospect.  Three draft picks for Kane and ROR, none of whom we likely will see playing for the Sabres for four plus years, assuming that we draft well.

[WildCard]

Garbage?? ROR was a 2nd round pick and we got two firsts and a second for him. Odds are--and this is all about playing the odds--we win this trade in the long run. He is 27 and will be over 30 by the time we make our run for the cup.

Why does that matter at all? 

[Doohicksie]

Wait really? 

 

Yeah, his display name is   ...

[3putt]

They did it with Matty Mo.  I think others are coming.  But you also to consider what any moves will do to your salary cap.  If you have a couple of toxic contracts it could be better to just let them expire than to pay on them for years.

 

As the last place team in the league, just who are we going dump cap on?  The reason we're taking on these contracts is that we can.  When more of the youth comes up for their contracts we will be more limited in the moves we can make, but for now, the contracts aren't hurting us too badly.

This is a reasonable take.  The downside to that strategy is the lack of spots for the younger players to grab.  You can have so many players on the NHL roster. If Asplund or Olofson are ready, what do we do with Pommers, Berglund etc.  Waiting for the contracts to expire also has a cost.

[Hoss]

Ha! That is so Because Buffalo!

 

If he does that, are we off the hook for his salary, cap-wise? If so, I think I'm okay with that.

He’s a free agent Botterill publicly indicated they had no interest in retaining. That’s so because he sucks.

[TrueBlueGED]

Hall wasn’t auctioned off in the same way ROR was.

 

 

Would you mind expanding upon this? I'm not sure what you're getting at with it, and don't want to type out a full response if it's not going to address what you're saying. The narrative around the Hall trade was full of leadership stuff, and Chiarelli was heavily reported to want to shake up the room and "hand the reigns" to McDavid.  But I'm not sure if that's what you meant.

 

 

My 2 cents:

 

- there has been plenty of sky-is-falling hyperbole in here but also plenty of excellent hockey talk.

 

- I think the TBPHD camp — ie those who wouldn’t have traded ROR for this package or really anything less than a socks-knocked-off offer — is well underestimating the impact of chemistry and interpersonal dynamics. It’s not just about the stats. What they’ve had for the past few years has clearly not worked. JB and PH are hockey lifers who were in a far better position than any of us to observe ROR and his impact on the rest of the team. I’m willing to accept their conclusion that they could not continue to have ROR on the team.

 

- there’s also quite a bit of premature judging of Thompson in here, along with declarations that he wasn’t a top prospect for STL. Dobberhockey, an excellent site, had him as their #3 prospect last fall (ahead of Kyrou and Dunn), and I saw a blues fan site that named him this spring as one of their “big 4.” So he certainly could turn into a very good young winger.

 

- Serious question for those unhappy with the trade: assuming this was in fact the best that could be obtained for ROR, and that any trade for a different Sabres core piece would have yielded a similarly disappointing return, would you have wanted to go into next season without having made a major “shakeup” trade?

 

1) I may well underrate the on-ice value of off-ice chemistry (note: I absolutely value on-ice chemistry, I just don't think it comes from the locker room). But, it's equally plausible that others over-value the locker room when overall team talent is poor. If the Sabres had a playoff roster and still managed to finish dead last, I'd be much more amenable to the "there had to be a shakeup" line of reasoning. However, the roster stunk, and results were pretty commensurate with what should have been expected with sub-replacement level goaltending. 

 

2) Yes. As I explained in #1, I think this team needs an influx of talent, not a shakeup. More generally, I'd rather not make any changes at all than make a bad change.

 

 

The other piece in this was clearing cap room to bring in Lucic.

 

Is this an argument for the trade? Because freeing up cap space to pay Lucic market value has been a pretty abject disaster for Edmonton.

[LGR4GM]

He’s a free agent Botterill publicly indicated they had no interest in retaining. That’s so because he sucks.

he who? Sbotka?

Edited July 2, 2018 by Skurk Liger

[bob_sauve28]

Why does that matter at all?

 

It matters because it shows we have a chance to pick another player as good or better...actually, three chances. And those players will be here when it matters.

[nfreeman]

I can only hope that StL big 4 has more upside than our big 4 of Carrier, Baptiste, Bailey, and Fasching. At this point I have no confidence that Thompson isn’t equivalent to Baptiste at best and Fasching at worst.

 

I would have gone into the season with ROR on the roster before making this move. The only way I choose otherwise is if he indicated that he wants out.

 

I think he did.  He didn't explicitly state it at the locker clean out but that certainly felt like the subtext of what he said to reporters that day.  And it sounded like there were issues long before that.

 

I don't love what we got in return.  I would have preferred some organization's top prospects but those guys almost never move.  (Would you have traded Mittelstadt at any point in the last year?)  But I'm not apoplectic about it either, and that's mainly because I think the Sabres needed to make a move to change their room.  The Sabres' biggest problem last year was coming out completely flat most games.  At some point, you need to shake the Etch-a-Sketch and try to build a team that gives a crap. And all the guys we're planning on contending with someday (Eichel, Dahlin, Mittelstadt, Reinhart, Risto) are still here.

 

Beat me to it.  We'll never know for sure, but I too interpret the end-of-season and post-season events, combined with ROR's previously forcing his way out of Colorado, as ROR asking for a trade.

[Randall Flagg]

After sleeping on this, I hate the trade more than I did yesterday. 

I think nfreeman phrases it incorrectly when he says the TBPHD group doesn't account for locker room stuff. We understand that it's a thing, and think that being a crappy team begets the locker room issues. It's not that ROR is sleeping with all of his teammate's wives, it's that we sucked and he freaking said so. That is literally the thing everyone points to when talking about his problems - saying that it is draining to play a garbage role on a garbage team that barely got out of the 50s as far as points in the standings go.

We had 3 good forwards this year. By good I mean GOOD. By good I mean, either they won their goddamn matchups and made the net team results better than it would be with league average replacement at that spot (Reinhart, ROR), or scored a lot of points (Eichel). I know we like to use the word "good" loosely to qualify a guy like Okposo, who has fairly recently seen NHL success, or (...I'm struggling to think of other names, our roster is that bad) Girgensons because he had 15 goals in 61 games once and has decent straight line speed, but these are not good NHL players. Our lack of good NHL players in the forward group is half of what made us so bad (Lehner + defense, but mostly Lehner, is the other half). I'm not saying the good teams have 12 good NHL forwards, but they have 6-8. The GM who was the architect of the league-worst depth scoring traded the best combination of possession and points we had because of this locker room issue, but he didn't get any good, as defined above, NHL players back, and we have 2 left, with hopes that Mittelstadt eventually becomes one. Great, you got the mopey guy out of the locker room, but you made the team worse for a prospect that Blues fans are ecstatic to move because he wasn't in their top 5. Botterill has blinked on two major trades so far. 

We can put Sobotka and Berglund in our depth all we want and pretend that's going to overcome not only the player we had in ROR, but the one we could have with adjusted usage, but I've read far too much about them in the last year to expect to be pleased with what they bring on the ice. Berglund might score some goals and be Okposo-good, and Sobotka is somebody Doug Armstrong pumped his fist in excitement upon learning he could move. I wouldn't be this upset if Berglund and Sobotka were NHL depth like Jordan Staal and JG Pageau. There's a reason St. Louis has been looking to shed their contracts for a year+ (the plus is for Patrick). They are not this depth. They are not good NHL players in the sense that we had better start using again watching our team if we actually want to see improved on-ice results.

It's in my sig, man. I hate the way this franchise looks at building hockey teams as much as I hate that stupid post during the tank year bragging about all of our third round picks we had. 
 

At least we flushed a Canadian CHL product for another Swede, center Patrik Berglund, whose last 180 games have seen 25 assists. 

[Hoss]

he who? Sbotka?

Nevermind - thought they were talking about Antipin and not Sobotka.

[bob_sauve28]

One current prospect.  Three draft picks for Kane and ROR, none of whom we likely will see playing for the Sabres for four plus years, assuming that we draft well.

In four years we should be a cup contender and ROR will be over thirty. I'd rather roll the dice on the young players at THAT time. This is a young league

[inkman]

Yeah, his display name is ...

Hoss? Makes perfect sense. :lol:

[pi2000]

They did it with Matty Mo. I think others are coming. But you also to consider what any moves will do to your salary cap. If you have a couple of toxic contracts it could be better to just let them expire than to pay on them for years.

 

As the last place team in the league, just who are we going dump cap on? The reason we're taking on these contracts is that we can. When more of the youth comes up for their contracts we will be more limited in the moves we can make, but for now, the contracts aren't hurting us too badly.

Moulson is still on the books... they didn't dump him on anybody. Bogo still on the books.

 

JBOt had last summer and now this summer to find creative ways to move them.. freeing up cap space to significantly improve the bottom 6 through 2 off-seasons of free agency and trade.

 

JBOT was billed as a cap genius, but nothing he's done strikes me as very impressive.

 

The bottom 6 still suck, bad contracts are still on the books and we're down two of our top point producers. Brilliant.

[TrueBlueGED]

It’s always been about Eichel, Reinhart, Ristolainen, Dahlin, Nylander and Mittlestadt.

I think we’ve hit on five of the six.

 

I am no less hopeful today than I was yesterday.

 

We were the worst team in hockey last year.did you expect status quo, or teams to trade us better players for the ones who led us to last place?

 

Definitely didn't expect that. But finishing in last place doesn't in and of itself mean we should move one of the few good players we have for lesser pieces.

 

 

You know, we could be right and O’Reilly is special, Sobotka and Berglund are cap dumps and the other three elements magic beans.

Or, the rest of the hockey world could be right and O’Reilly is very good, but not special, Sobotka and Berglund are useful third liners, Thompson is a solid prospect and a first and a second are valuable assets.

 

Truth is probably somewhere in between. I plan to watch and find out.

 

We once traded the best goalie in the history of the game for the 30th pick in the draft and a whiny Russian. We won a presidents trophy five years later.

 

The hyperbole in here tonight is kinda funny.

 

Is this similar to the "300 hockey people" who would have made the Hall-Larsson trade? FWIW, reaction seems to be quite mixed if you wander outside of the old school hockey reporters. 

 

 

What GM has ever turned that purported trick and thereby taught the market a lesson?

 

As if. Markets are markets. They bear what they will.

 

The idea that you’d retain a player that’s a depreciating asset and is anathema to your room/culture, just so you can “show” how you won’t be “had” is one that just doesn’t wash.

 

The team was the worst in the league. They needed a firm shake up.

 

Of course, moving a player because "something had to be done" isn't the firmest of logic either. I've come to accept that Botterill felt he had to move O'Reilly for the sake of the room, but I don't think that means I should roll over and play dead and think it was the right move. A whole lot of GMs have made "culture change" trades that have failed spectacularly because all they did was lose talent.

[Randall Flagg]

And if you really do have to trade ROR, like Duchene (who said worse things and was a worse player at the time of trade) then don't blink when you do it. When noting the 3-way trade Colorado got a player the level of Kyle Turris back without having to take cap dumps. There is nothing in the same universe as Kyle Turris value in this trade. They did the impossible and actually played a few games with Matt the following season before trading him, and you can see how it ruined their season, only posting a 50 point standings increase from the one before. 

In four years we should be a cup contender and ROR will be over thirty. I'd rather roll the dice on the young players at THAT time. This is a young league

 

Why should I believe that we'll be a cup contender in 4 years? I was spouting and told the same thing in the throes of the tank and can go back to find the posts from everybody to prove it. We were getting a franchise center that was going to help us get there, along with ROR. So excuse me for being skeptical that Tage Thompson is the key. 

[LGR4GM]

Beat me to it.  We'll never know for sure, but I too interpret the end-of-season and post-season events, combined with ROR's previously forcing his way out of Colorado, as ROR asking for a trade.

This is the 2nd team ROR has had an issue on... I find that interesting. 

[TrueBlueGED]

Moulson is still on the books... they didn't dump him on anybody. Bogo still on the books.

 

JBOt had last summer and now this summer to find creative ways to move them.. freeing up cap space to significantly improve the bottom 6 through 2 off-seasons of free agency and trade.

 

JBOT was billed as a cap genius, but nothing he's done strikes me as very impressive.

 

The bottom 6 still suck, bad contracts are still on the books and we're down two of our top point producers. Brilliant.

 

I'll defend Botterill here. I may not love his timeline for rebuilding the team, but given what it is, it makes little sense to give up assets to move bad contracts that will naturally expire before we're ready to contend for much of anything.