Monday Mailbag Part 2: Trading Sam Gagner, a Spot for Dahlen, and Blogging Platforms

I would guess that the market for Sam Gagner at the moment is virtually nonexistent. With the season he’s coming off of, at his salary, with another two years left on his deal, I think he’s a tough sell to any team looking for someone to put them over the edge. Even at half the salary, I think most teams would be more interested in leaving a roster spot open for a young player than in taking a chance on a player who showed next to nothing last season. Their best chance at moving him will be at this or next year’s deadline. Given the familiarity, I could see Columbus possibly having some interest. I wouldn’t expect much in return, though. A late pick, maybe.

The roster spot alone makes option 2 preferable. I’d like to see Adam Gaudette make the team without having to risk losing one of Nikolay Goldobin or Brendan Leipsic. They’d clearly lost a step last season, but I still think the Sedins would have provided more value together than Beagle and Roussel, and certainly wouldn’t be eating up cap and roster space over the next four seasons.

I’ve been on board the Petrus Palmu hype train since he was drafted, and think highly of Jonah Gadjovich and Jonathan Dahlen, so I wasn’t surprised the Baby Canucks had three forward lines that could dominate. I think what surprised me the most was how engaged Pettersson looked defensively. He took a few shifts to get going in the offensive zone, but looked committed on the backcheck immediately. His line got stuck in their own zone a couple times and he’s still very raw, but the effort was there and that’s a great sign. He looks like he really wants to prove he can play down the middle.

The day 1 performance by the Okanagan Events Centre DJ was as dominant as the performance on the ice. His playlist felt like it was pulled directly from the soundtrack of an early-2000s-era EA NHL game with a mixture of pop punk, hip hop, and alternative rock. The day two performance was a bit of a letdown, but full credit to him/her for managing to pull out the themes to Seinfeld, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, That ’70s Show, and Frasier over the course of the weekend.

We can only hope.

He made a great individual effort to score his goal in game two but overall he didn’t really stand out. I can’t say I’m hugely familiar with him, (the Victoria Royals are my hometown team so I don’t see the Giants as often,) but based on his numbers and profile I don’t think there’s much there.

There was an apple tree in the backyard, I had one but most of them became applesauce.

They just don’t have the room. Given the current makeup of the roster, I can’t even see Gaudette making the team and he’s much higher up the depth chart. That’s probably not the end of the world in Dahlen’s case, though. I liked what I saw but he still needs to develop. If he has a good season in Utica I’d like to see him get an extended audition after the deadline, assuming some trades are made.

I started with WordPress and that’s what I’d recommend to anyone starting out. It’s reasonably intuitive and whatever you can’t figure out is easy enough to google. WordPress Pro has pretty much become the industry standard at this point, so it’ll make transitioning to a professional website easy in the future if you make it to that point. I had to use a variety of different platforms for my digital communication program and didn’t like any as much as WordPress. I found Blogger/Blogspot to be too cookie-cutter and while WIX and Weebly look great, I found them difficult to figure out. Unless you’re really interested in showcasing your web design skills, getting a WordPress and pumping out content is probably the best way to get started.