glen a richter wrote:I mentioned this in another thread and I'll re-visit it here. I get that the cap hit is huge, but if the contracts going the other way nullify that, I don't think I'd be against trading for Phil Kessel, whom evidently Toronto is shopping. Yeah he's a bit of a dick headcase and when we were watching the skills competition my wife, who played college hockey and played with NHLer Chris Higgins when they were both in high school, so she knows a thing or two about hockey, referred to him as the out of shape looking fat guy, but you can't argue with the numbers he has and can put up. What you do get is 7 years at an 8 mil hit, which won't be as bad as it seems now just down the road. You can get Stastny going the other way, or Oshie/Backes both. Someone said it in the thread I posted this in originally (Gaijin?) that the problem is that as Blues fans for some reason we want the good guy over the good player. I would take a team full of assholes if it landed a Cup in the hands of the Blues captain.
Yeah, I said that in the other thread. I think it's true for St. Louis fans in general (hockey/baseball/football)- we have a high tolerance for losses/failure if our players show heart and are "good people" (meaning they are active in charity and display good personal character). If a player is a troublemaker, locker room cancer, or has issues with getting on the wrong side of the law, we tend to sour on them quickly and they usually find themselves on a different team the next season. Not saying that's the right way to go, nor is it necessarily the right way to run a sports organization, but I think that's just a characteristic of the city and its fans.
Doing a quick comparison between Stastny and Kessel, Kessel averages 27.4 goals and 30.3 assists per season over his career (.37 goals/game, .41 assists/game), while Stastny averages 19.5 goals and 36.4 assists per season (.29 goals/game, .54 assists/game). Kessel has the decided advantage in goals, but I'm too lazy to look at how their playoff performance compares.
I don't know. While Kessel puts up more goals, I think Stastny's low numbers last season were a result of a different team, different coach, different system. I think his numbers will bounce back, so I'm not ready to ship him off yet. I think he can be a lynchpin for our team for a number of years still. Plus, I don't know if Toronto will want to ditch Kessel now that they have a new coach. They will probably want to hang on to that offensive talent and see what Babcock can do with it.