I haven’t heard it yet, but apparently Damien Cox made some rather interesting comments (surely a first) on Prime Time Sports at some point last week. His claim boils down to the Vancouver Canucks being so far above the rest of the Canadian NHL clubs that you couldn’t assemble a team from the other 6 that could compete with the Canucks.
Obviously, there are a few things to take into account when trying to prove him wrong.
- The salary cap will surely make this difficult, as the Canucks have proven adept at finding good value…something some of the other Canadian clubs have repeatedly failed to do.
- It can’t be gauged how well such a team would gel and/or play together.
- We’ll obviously never see it happen, so nothing will be proven one way or the other.
- Some of the moves below are only made feasible (contract wise) because the inbound players are on still on their entry-level contracts.
- The Calgary Flames are absolutely atrocious.
As a Leafs fan, I started with them.
The first thing I did was gut the goaltending. In switching from James Reimer and Jonas Gustavsson to Carey Price and Ondrej Pavelec, our salary for goalies goes from $3.15M to $3.9M. It’s obviously a huge upgrade, and one that at the very least puts them on par with the Canucks.
There are 2 holdovers form the Leafs on the back-end, Dion Phaneuf and Cody Franson. Phaneuf provides horrible value but I’m still holding out hope that he’ll live up to his contract. Franson is on the books for only $800K and is well worth that. I bring in Dustin Byfuglien ($5.2M), Josh Gorges ($2.5M), Erik Karlsson ($1.3M) and Chris Phillips (just over $3M). That leaves us with a far superior defensive group than what the Canucks bring to the table, and will cost us just under $20M.
The real difficulty here is in the forward corps. It’s probably not a stretch to suggest that the Canucks have the 3 top forwards in the country. I actually keep a fair number of the Leafs, as they’ve proven to be reasonably good at what they do (and atrocious at the rest). Kessel, Lupul, Armstrong, Grabovski, Kulemin, and Mike Brown are sticking around. Kulemin sees his role change to that of a 3rd liner and penalty killer, which he’s quite good at. From Ottawa I get Jason Spezza (finally, a #1 center for Kessel/Lupul) and Nick Foligno. Ales Hemsky and Taylor Hall make the trip from Edmonton, joining Max Pacioretty to round out the forwards. I haven’t put a lot of thought into the lines, but we’d probably see Spezza between Lupul and Kessel, Grabovski between Hamsky and Pacioretty, a 3rd line of Kulemin/Foligno/Hall, and a 4th line of Brown/Steckel/Armstrong.
While Cox was probably not right, it’s not nearly as ridiculous as it appears at first sight.
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