Article from Gary Mason, known confidant of the Aqua family.
Leaves the door open for a rebuild, and potentially a QH trade at the deadline should he not have interest in re-signing.
Likely to calm the market down after everyone was up in arms over JR and PA’s comments.
IMO, we’re in the midst of a rebuild year anyways, club is bottom 5 as constructed and losing ground quickly. Just hope they sell off the right guys at the deadline.
18 comments
Contrary to what people think, JR isn’t an idiot. He can’t publicly talk about a rebuild when you still have a chance to sign the greatest defensemen of the last 30 yrs.
Glad to hear they’ll actually rebuild if Hughes is gone.
Rebuild. Discussion over.
Paywall!
Yes obviously rebuild. Not even a question.
If they continue with more seasons like this it will be worse from a business perspective than a rebuild.
The team hasnt even re-tooled properly in the past years. They just burn draft picks like nothing and make contender-like moves.
Even if you don’t know what Hughes wants yet, don’t freeze, pick a direction after the new year. Show him you have a vison for the future.
If its a step-back year, you sell assets and hopefully draft high. Show Quinn that there is youth and a future for him to lead in Vancouver.
If he chooses to walk anyway, trade him for the best deal possible and you’ve already got a headstart on the rebuild/retool.
Not sure how you would even rebuild with a Hughes level trade. Like the return would probably be good prospects not picks. Who ever gets him will be a playoff team so the picks would suck. And then we have all the players with no moves so we would remain mid.
It’s a question that has plagued this team for the past decade and a half. Having already blown several chances for a full rebuild, I am very much pessimistic about the outlook — yes, even with JR at the helm.
On one hand, potentially losing the greatest defenseman and one of the greatest players this organization has ever seen is painful and unfathomable.
On the other hand, we’re perpetually stuck in the messy middle and destined to not make the playoffs and not draft high enough to select true impact players in the draft.
The way I see it, assuming Quinn wants to play with his brothers and the fact that the cap is going to rise like crazy over the next few years, the way to build your team is NOT through free agency anymore and the best move would be to trade Quinn for a monster haul.
With all of the extra cap space soon, teams will re-sign their best players resulting in less of them hitting free agency. There is going to be more of an emphasis on building through the draft than ever before. This is only going to trend more this way if the NHL continues to expand teams as well.
There was a lot of angst in the market following the most recent Rutherford interview, but you had to consider that management has to play to their “out”, which is Quinn re-signing amidst a ~2 year retool, and so, they had to decline any intention of a teardown rebuild, but left everything in-between on the table (“a period of transition”).
Given that Mason is a mouthpiece for ownership, this is a backdoor admission that they will do a more comprehensive rebuild if Hughes intends to leave.
Management hasn’t made any panic moves yet, so the best case scenario is one where they sell Hughes on the “transition”, don’t move any futures out, and if they continue to crater the way the underlying stats indicate they will (despite the optimistic picture Mason is trying to paint), then shop Sherwood, Kane, O’Connor, Blueger and Forbort hard at the deadline, as well as Garland (or even DeBrusk) if the offer is right. Check-in with Hughes in the summer, and if he wants to stay, we’ll have loaded up on futures that should cash in for a contention window around 2028-2031.
And if he doesn’t want to stick around, well, then, the more complex process will have to unfold.
Franny: NO
Hughes, Demko, Petey, Miller and Quinn is as good of a core as you could possibly ask for from a rebuild and for one reason or another, it just did not work.
That’s more top end talent than the 2011 team. Benning failed to put good pieces around them and then as soon as Alvin and Rutherford came, everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong.
This is reassuring coming from Mason who IIRC has close ties to Francesco
Ah we’re good. Let’s go pick up Jayson Megna, Ronald Kenins, and Zac Dalpe
It shouldn’t even be a question. This team needs a rebuild. We’ve seen throughout this season that they play hard, and they do give an honest effort for the most part. But this team simply doesn’t have the top end skill or the depth to win on a consistent basis.
Whole league needs to rebuild then lol
Natruwlaly what happens when you get the top .001% of players in world games pretty even and ends up closer to 50% chance u win any game I don’t really care anymore just enjoy watching hockey.
Why rebuild when we don’t even know what this team can do when healthy? I don’t get that part.