Everything Else

This Is Not My Beautiful Wife

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With the news just dropping that Johnny Oduya is also going to be seeing Dallas regularly from a DC-9 at night, it’s probably high time we take a look at what is now his replacement, Trevor Daley.

Before we do that, a final word on Oduya’s departure. Up until Saad’s trade, I really had no hope that Oduya would be returning. And not much of a desire for it either. The Hawks had squeezed out what has to be almost all of his plus-play the past couple years, he’s 34 and there are limits to what he gives you. While he would have been a great place-holder while Johns learned the ropes and up until Johns took his role, I didn’t think that was completely necessary.

But then Johns was dealt, and in came Daley, and as you’re about to see playing Daley in the top four has the potential to be a real, real problem. The sanctuary of the known that Oduya provides suddenly seemed very reassuring. And now we’re about to be tossed into a pretty choppy sea with no guarantee of port.

Everything Else

Let’s Compare The Destruction

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This is a post we might have to keep coming back to as the summer develops. But I thought it would prove useful to compare the sell-offs of the summers of ’10 and this one, and to compare how poised the Hawks are for their next Cup as they were with that one. It won’t make for pleasant reading, but so much of what we do doesn’t either so you’ll be used to that. No time like the present, let’s dive on in and not care if the water is shallow or not.

What Hawks Lost After ’10: It’s a pretty long list. Dustin Byfuglien, Andrew Ladd, Kris Versteeg (and it’s pretty funny that they simple CAN’T move him now), Brent Sopel, Ben Eager, John Madden, and Colin Fraser. In other terms, the Hawks lost 2/3rd of their third line (Versteeg and Ladd flanked Bolland most of that season), their 4th line center, a top six left winger (that’s where Byfuglien ended up anyway), a couple other components that rotated in on the 4th line in Eager and Burish, and their #5 d-man.

I should also add that Antti Niemi had to be left on the side of the road after his arbitration hearing.

Everything Else

I Understand It, But I Don’t Want It

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It’s been two full days since Patrick Sharp was traded to Dallas. The wait between the actual trade and this necessary reflective piece was not only as a result of the news coming in the middle of the evening on Friday, but also as a result of needing a couple days to let the reality sink in and to try to process what exactly even my own personal feelings are on this subject. And truthfully I don’t even know if I’ve fully sorted through them yet.

Everything Else

Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees Stan Will Have His Picnic

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Never let it be said that the Hawks aren’t completely aware of how to manipulate reaction to stuff like this, because I don’t think it’s any coincidence that they dumped the news of Patrick Sharp and Stephen Johns getting dealt to Dallas (where Johns can pound on all their forwards for the next decade five times a year) for Ryan Garbutt and Trevor Daley. Nice try Stan, but we’re always watching.

There’s so many factors in this I’m not sure where to start, so I’ll go player by player. We knew Sharp was likely to go, even after Saad had to be tossed overboard because the math didn’t work with both Sharp and Oduya. No one expected a great return on Sharp, but I can’t help but think Stan Bowman overplayed his hand a bit here. While we won’t ever know what exactly was on offer before and at the draft, we know that there were discussions with several teams while Stan reportedly chased a 1st and a prospect. What he ended up with was an aging, one-way d-man (and not the right way) and a middle aged 4th liner, and he had to toss in Stephen Johns for the privilege of that. Would a 2nd and a 3rd round pick really have been any worse?

Everything Else

Friday Foofaraw: Scattershot

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For those of you that joined the blog recently, during the summer on Friday’s is when I tend to just write about whatever I want, as do the others on the blog. Feather even went through a streak of reviewing video games and The Walking Dead. So prepare yourself, as I’ve got all sorts of things rattling around this bald dome of mine.

-As the Hawks sit between several rocks and a very hard place with the cap constraints, the past couple days I can’t help but cast my mind back just short of three years ago. That would be Bettman Lockout III. Or maybe even Bettman Lockout II, which got us this current system. During that lockout, most owners were under a gag order. We never got what Rocky was really thinking during all of it, and whenever he did talk he was on the party line, out of fear of massive fines from The Commish.

And owners do that during labor disputes, but those labor disputes, at least these days, aren’t really about owners vs. players. They’re owners vs. owners, and the owners take it out on the players to protect themselves from each other and themselves. They know that when back to normal business, they’re going to do everything they can to put a winning team out there and all those loopholes get closed in the next CBA.