Monday Mailbag: The Beginning

Hey! It’s been a few days since Rhys told the world that I would be taking over here, and since then, I’ve been doing my best to get myself 100% up-to-speed with the goings on here at the Army. As well, I’ve been looking at introducing some new things, both behind the scenes and out in the open.

This is one of the latter. I’ve run a weekly mailbag at The Leafs Nation for quite some time now, and I feel like it would be great to have the same thing here. We’re going to rotate the staff members that are involved in future weeks, but this time around, I’ll take a shot at answering a few softballs from the crowd:

That’s not a very good way at looking at the issue at hand, if we’re being honest with ourselves. Avoiding a rebuild because your team doesn’t have a prospect pool is counter-intuitive; you rebuild to create that pool of young talent to attempt ot succed with in the future.

Besides, I don’t think you’re giving Corrado or the pool enough credit. He’s unlikely to be a top-end defencemen, but getting regular NHL minutes isn’t completely out the question. Jordan Subban and Andrey Pedan both have outside chances to become regulars. Again, not the blue chip talent you want leading your team in a few years, but that’s why you go through with the process to begin with.

This is going to be a weird answer coming from somebody who just suggested the Canucks need to go on a full-on rebuild to have full success, but I feel that the Sedins still have a couple of years left in Vancouver. The reality is that any team who is interested in them will want to acquire the twins in a package deal, and their salary makes it so very hard to pull that off.

Not to say that the Sedins are overpaid; $7 million each is about market value, if not a good deal on Henrik’s part specifically. But $14 million is close to 20% of a team’s available cap space, and it’s hard to believe that there’s going to be a team that is on the verge of being competitive that will have floor-esque space to take the two on. Otherwise, they would have to give salary back, which could be counter-intuitive to the Canucks’ plans in a rebuild.

Alternatively, there’s the retention option, which a smart rebuilder may legitimately consider. However, the Canucks are already retaining salary on Roberto Luongo, meaning that retention on a Sedin trade would eat up their two remaining spots. It also requires Jim Benning to commit to eating nearly $7 million in the name of a rebuild; a radical change that may not happen by March 2017. 

Barring a very quick shift in philsophy the Sedins likely get traded at the deadline on the last year of their deal as a “super rental” package. 

Appreciating games is a given. No matter how good or bad your favourite team is, you’re consuming an entertainment product, and it’s not worth following along if you’re not entertained. If you’re pro-tank, this means watching opposition teams pull off the extraordinary. If you’re optimistic, you’ve got fingers crossed for upsets across the bored. If you’re indifferent, you at least want the games to be close.

This team may not be on the rise, but given the roster available, they’ll be entertainingly mediocre at best and hilariously bad at worst. Worth the eyeballs, no doubt. If you’re looking to cheer for losses, managment trust is irrelevant; if they’ve got a masterplan, being a basement team will help them slot great talent into their roadmap. If they have no plan, ownership will recognize this enough to swing some axes. It’s a win-win scenario.

Definitely possible. I’m sure that everybody involved wants to see Ryan Miller play as much as possible, in an attempt to get the most out of their investment. But Cannata had flashes of brilliance in the AHL and ECHL this year, and if the opportunity comes knocking, there’s no reason to not see what he can do. At the age of twenty five, this is the perfect time for a “put up or shut up” look that will either end his hopes or create yet another controversy.

For the record, I haven’t left The Leafs Nation. I’m still writing there full time; I’m just contributing here on a bigger scale and with even more frequency. With that said, you pose a good point, one that people have made to me repeatedly since the word got out about my new home.

Bad situations have created some of the best work in hockey journalism over the past decade. If you follow a team that consistently wins, you’re probably more likely to sit back and laugh about success than you are to try to figure out the reason your team is successful. Conversely, if you’ve screamed at your television fifteen times in the past fourty eight seconds because the on-ice product you’re consuming is terrible, you’re more likely to be proactive about finding ways to fix that. 

These frustration-laden attempts to point out and patch failure will ultimately grow the way that people see and interact with the game, no matter what situation the teams that get caught in the crossfire are in. That’s exciting to me, and you can tell that a lot of great work is happening here. I don’t hate being a part of that.

Also, I’ve been following the Canucks almost as long as I’ve followed the Leafs. The two have given me a lifetime’s worth of self-hate already. It can’t really get much worse.