Casual Canuck

Crossposted at HFBoards The Canucks have a long off-season coming up. I don't understand why they thought this team could compete for the playoffs this season, constructed as it was, especially when the previous season's results made it clear this team didn't have the talent level to compete in this league. It was obvious from the get-go there'd be no chemistry aside from the top seven or eight players on the team, and there'd be great difficulty scoring, especially on the back-end. There was simply a talent deficit on the team, which free agency couldn't solve. They weren't, then, only one or two scorers away from competing for the playoffs. They were an entire bottom roster away. It was also obvious signing a big-name free agent would actually create problems for the team, because they didn't have the right sort of construction to allow a big-name player to join the team, and succeed. The Canucks didn't have a playmaking centre as...

Crossposted from HFBoards Time to dust this blog off of dust, I suppose. Just in time for the season's end. I post at HFBoards under the alias, The Extrapolater. Rant alert. I can't even with this coach. Not even just a little. I just can't even. Been trying to figure him out, but it's taken a long time. He doesn't understand his players. That's it. He doesn't know what he has in his players. Doesn't know their strengths and weaknesses. Or rather, he has a shallow understanding of them, and instead of reinforcing players' strengths, tries to compensate for their weaknesses, instead. That works for your scrubs, but for your talented players, you want them doing what they do best. And his understanding of player chemistry is weak, also. Sedins with Eriksson equals scoring chances. Sedins and Chaput equal nothing. But he insists on the latter. A great deal of coaching in any sport is simply putting the right players into the rights p...

In all honesty, I'm fairly ambivalent about the choice for the Canucks first round pick, this year. In fact, I'm a bit hesitant. Juolevi may, and, in fact, probably will become a fine defense-men However, let's disregard what Juolevi may become, and concentrate on whom the Canucks didn't pick. They didn't pick Tkachuk, who was the consensus number five, overall, on most draft lists. Whether he'll become a star like his father before him is also unimportant, at this moment. As of this moment, Tkachuk was the best player available at number five. It's a simple argument. He's a forward, and we can guess at a forward's potential much more easily than we can a defense-man's. He scored metric tonnes in junior. He's a known commodity. Defense-men, on the other hand, are becoming a bit voodoo in the first round. We may or not get a player who'll play up to his potential. But that's unimportant, right now. Instead, let us consider the Ca...