I stopped watching after they gave up the 3rd goal with 13 seconds left in the 2nd....brutal watching these games...almost as bad as watching a full Cubs game 
my stomach just cant take it, I keep thinking about all the players we had to dump, and how we'd be wiping the floor with these guys again this year if it weren't for the cap
Oh well, probably only 2 more games to endure...
Its almost worse because you got to see how good they were last year, just dominant in all facets and how much they are struggling this year. Its tough. Hard salary cap really did a number of their roster.
On your prospect post...IMO seeing skill in a hockey player (from a scouting standpoint) seems to be one of the easier jobs in sports. Would you agree with that? I hated seeing Skille go and am dumbfounded by whats going on with Beach. And thought Morin had more to offer. Any chance the Hawks can get a lot of value in return for Kane right now?
I wouldn't say its any easier then baseball or football...I would say basketball is probably the easiest simply because you only have 2 rounds...But I would compare it much more to baseball because you are drafting 17, 18 year olds most of the time, and then they usually go to college after that or go play juniors for a few years.
Beach I called in the off season last year, I know a few of you guys were high on him, but given his age and history he just seemed like a classic case of a bust to me, I felt if he was going to pan out he would have had to be on the roster thsi year, and he wasn't, in fact i think he didn't even make second cuts, which is bad! I could still be wrong, but for a guy who is 22 already to be getting passed up by a kid that was just in the NCAA final 4 ,Ben Smith (who I'm pretty impressed with, I think could be a really good player for us next year by the way) is just a red flag for me. this is a guy who had size and could skate, but has a lazy tag, and undisciplined, these were the knocks on him going into the draft and its why he dropped to the Hawks.
As far as this season and Kane goes, I would say this season has panned out pretty much how I expected it to.. Kane is a good player, but he's not the kind of player that is going to be very effective on a shallow team, and this year Hawks team is shallow...lets face it last year we had 4 lines we could roll out there, this year we have 2 at best, I knew the lack of depth was going to allow teams to zero in on players like Kane, Toews, even Hossa.
When you combine everything we are talking about here, this is why I was so against giving hjalmarsson 4 mil a year...forward was not an area of depth on this team after the cuts, but defense was, we had Leddy waiting in the wings, we have another guy Dylan Olsen who easily could have been called up this year...I would have kept either Buff, or Ladd and let SJ overpay for hjalmarsson...and actually Buff could have played either forward or D if you kept him, so if you did find that you needed help on the backline you could have always moved buff back, and allowed him to play power play forward...I just think that was a big mistake in the offseason.
as far as trading a guy like Kane, 6.3 million would allow you to go after a couple of decent 3 million range guys and get some depth back on this team again...its not going to happen though...this team is locked in with who they have for the next several years..I hate to say it, but we could see even more drop off from this year to next...just look at the UFA's and RFA's on our team, and we only have about 8 million in projected cap space...that number could go down because they cap is probabaly going down
http://www.capgeek.com/charts.php?Team=11&salary_cap_mil=59&salary_cap_thou=4
