The Other Stempniak

hah, so that’s your /r/hockey post?

stick and stones and all that shit.
Ya if you punch a guy for calling you a name, then enjoy jail or anger management dude

He’s a dick, but he’s an honest dick. I’ve never heard him say an untrue word, or at least one he didn’t believe to be the truth.

Either that… or he’s just a caustic misanthropic bastard with a healthy appetite for schadenfreude. Not that that’s a bad thing.

looking at the teams we’re playing in the months ahead, we definitely need two or three to collapse.

No wait, all time.

Point is, a 1st may be good or we could get someone we know is good OR we can just shut up about GM’s did in the past and not what they current GM is doing and not make yourself sound like an idiot

So it takes two first rounders to get a Kessel, and another two + to get Getzlaf. Cool. We can keep doing this “rebuild on the fly” for another 8 years and then maybe we’ll finally have a top-6.

Does a Penner include a case of maple syrup?

Did Burke somehow fuck over the Leafs by trading those picks for Kessel?

You better believe that he did. Kessel is not worth all those picks, not even close. Here is teh copper and blue article on 1st round pick value.

http://www.coppernblue.com/2011/4/4/2082829/nhl-draft-pick-value-first-round

2nd overall pick – .882 chance of being an impact player.
9th overall pick – .412 chance of same
32nd overall pick – ..149 chance of same.

Add it up, and Burke gave up Kessel, who let’s for arguments sake has a 100% chance of being an impact player, for 1.443 impact players.

Burke screwed up. He significantly overvalued the Leafs entering his first full year as GM. If the Leafs had instead finished 9th or better from the bottom in that first year, then the trade is just about a wash and makes sense. But it wasn’t and Burke deserves to wear the responsibility for that.

Damn, Kessel’s odds of getting a serious, career-altering injury are pretty high.

This scares me more than anything. I honestly cannot think of a better GM or GM team out there in the NHL that would be available for the Leafs, regardless of how much money they could throw at him (Would Shero leave the situation he’s got going in Pittsburgh?)

The only GM I’d conceivably like to have other than Burke would be Poile (maybe Chiarelli, but good luck getting him out of Boston).

I dont’ think its fair to blame Burke for it all right now. I mean our Roster is unbelievably better than the one two years ago, and really as a group should be better than any other post-lockout team, given we mostly had a ton of underperforming, mediocre players and Mats Sundin.

I am really hopping off the fence towards the “Fire Wilson” side though, because this team has not shown improvement in several key categories (notably PK) over a sustained period of time. And when you look at the team, we might be a bubble team but we’ve lost games against other bubble teams over and over.

Brian Burke wasn’t brought in to rebuild the Leafs. He was brought in because MLSE thought he could win.

Come on, haven’t we touched on this 8236235 times already? Nevermind his bluster about “fuck a 5 year plan”, most rational people didn’t expect Burke to win anything thus far. Apart from maybe a draft lottery or two. The vast majority of changes that have been made over his tenure are not changes that immediately bear fruit. We know that, MLSE knows that. The Leafs were never going to make the playoffs again, period, if Burke didn’t do what he did in his rebuilding phase. If MLSE has to spend $40-50M to get the management team they want in place to get this team into the playoffs, that’s chump change compared to what they’re going to make when that time finally comes.

The flipside to that is Bryan Colangelo, who was also brought in to win and has done the kind of giant trades and big-ticket signings that fans seem to demand from Burke. The result is a team that has completely changed in personality and style each year, and gotten progressively worse. Colangelo’s problem is he is only just now realizing that the Raptors need to be burned to the ground and rebuilt, but it is increasingly unlikely he’ll be around to see it through

Odds of Burke getting fired have got to be pretty low. He makes something like Kessel money for (I think) 3 more seasons. Ownership would have to eat way too much money to get rid of him.

And I sure as hell hope management doesn’t “turn the heat up” on him to start looking for quick fixes. Don’t we all agree that was a huge part of what went wrong during the JFJ regime – constantly making bad trade-offs just to try to edge into the playoffs? Part of the reason Burke got the contract he did was so that he could insulate himself from that kind of pressure. Ownership needs to stay out of hockey decisions.

but the Leafs are still in the same place they were when JFJ was here. 9th-10th place in the standings.

That’s pretty ingenuous when you’ve just acknowledged he’s revamped the roster and prospect development system.

Leafs are what, the 2nd youngest team in the league? Basically everyone under the age of 25 can’t really be expected to be consistent, night-in night-out performers yet because they don’t have the experience to do so yet.