Monday Mailbag: Trades, Historically Bad Teams, and Boiling Frogs

I’m going to say Michael Del Zotto. He’s on the last year of his contract and possesses a few of the qualities playoff teams tend to look for at the deadline. I would add Anders Nilsson to that list for the same reason, but given how poorly he played towards the end of last year and in the preseason, I don’t imagine he’ll look attractive to many teams.

It’s not a terrible idea, but I’m sympathetic to the theory that pro and amateur scouting require different skill sets. In amateur scouting, you’re acquiring a player for what they could be. In pro scouting, with a few exceptions, you’re acquiring them for what they already are. Teams get themselves in trouble when those wires get crossed.

I’d imagine they’d waive Alex Biega given his role. As far as who deserves it? Take your pick. Other than Chris Tanev, Alex Edler, and Troy Stecher, no one has played well enough to feel comfortable.

Does the preseason count as a type of season?

For three straight summers, the Canucks have given significant money and term to free agents. Teams that are intentionally trying to lose don’t go out and sign players for four years. They just don’t. Believe it or not, every move the Canucks make is with the belief that it will make the team better.

We can only hope so and it can’t come soon enough.

The Canucks best chance of appearing halfway-respectable next season is to put Horvat and Baertschi on a line together, with Boeser and Pettersson on another. That gives them two lines that should be able to produce offence, and puts the team’s most proven goal scorer with the less-established centre. Offensively, I think that’s the path most likely to lead them to some level of success at even-strength this season.

The worst goal differential in league history was an astonishing -265 by the 1974-75 Washington Capitals. To put that in perspective, the highest scoring team last season, the Tampa Bay Lightning, scored a total of 290 goals. It’s inconceivable that the Canucks could match that level of ineptitude.

The Sens are the early favourite to be the worst team in the league, but the Canadiens, Sabres, Red Wings, Islanders, and even the Blackhawks could all feasibly give them a run for their money. Over an 82-game season it’s conceivable that the Canucks could be better than two to four but definitely not all six of those teams. Knowing their luck they will probably finish somewhere around 27th or 28th and draft roughly in the same spot they did this year.

Watching the Canucks over the past five years or so has been like watching someone conduct a painfully slow boiling frog experiment in real time. In this instance, the fans are the frog, and the pot is the team, and the boiling water is the series of increasingly poor roster decisions. It’s not a perfect metaphor, but you get the idea.

If you read the right publications, follow the right people on twitter, or listen to the right radio programs, you know people have been saying the water has been getting warmer for years; the fans, however- not all of them, but a dedicated contingency- have said otherwise. At some point you have to accept that if they had the ability to tell they were going to boil alive they’d have jumped out by now.

Over the past four years, the Canucks’ front office has been a lot like the players they’ve targeted in trades or free agency (though not at the draft, to their credit). They do a lot of little things that kill you over long period of time, but they tend not to make the kind of decisions that can be immediately diagnosed as mistakes. The bad contracts will undeniably cost the team in the long run, but until they take an obvious and immediate “L” in a transaction, it’s hard to see anyone changing their minds.

I think for the die-hards to really turn on the front office, they would have to seriously bungle a trade in Subban-for-Weber or Hall-for-Larsson fashion. Otherwise, it’s going to be a long, slow process of gradually realizing the team isn’t getting better even when they should be; and that could take years.