Steadevils Posted January 16, 2013 Share Posted January 16, 2013 I think having a surpluss of experienced D will help us enormously this year. With the tight schedule there is not a lot of practice time to teach a young D-man call-up the ropes. Also, with stretches like 5 games in 7 days having 8 D will be vital. A week long minor injury could mean needing a replacement for 5 games. My point is our wealth of NHL defensemen could be depleted rather quick and we should not be jumping to trade one of these guys. You can almost pencil A-train in for 12 games missed so that's down to 7 D for a quarter of the season..Others have recent injury history too (Fayne coming off surgery, Larsson's back, Tallinder leg, Salvadore cuncussions). I think 8 NHL ready Defensemen is the appropriate number for this 48 game sprint. As I said earlier the lack of practice time and the slow learning curve of defense make this a bad year to have an emergency AHL call-up. Urbom would likely be the call-up and could fill in, but he would not have the luxury of getting used to the speed of the NHL. Every game is vital. So in my opinion the trade bait should not be the NHL defensemen. If a trade is needed the bait should be the glut of almost NHL ready defensemen we have in our system. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moustic Posted January 16, 2013 Share Posted January 16, 2013 You know the season is about to start when you saw more and more posts of SterioDesign being pessimist about our offense (and our team) ; ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
caron14 Posted January 16, 2013 Share Posted January 16, 2013 it's not only that im looking at our roster and see that theres things missing... im looking at all the teams around us and they all seem to have wayyyy deeper offensive then us. yes we have a deep group of dman... one of them is a scoring defensemen and the rest are mostly so and so good all around or stay home. We won't have much help from the Ds in term of scoring, while other teams have established offensive dman. plus with our goalies we might have to score a little bit more to cover for them. We absolutely need more help with scoring. Seems to be better than us offensively.... Where was B richards last year against us? where was gaborik? claude Giroux hvae less point in 5 on 5 hockey than brodeur in our series.... Pittsburg lost j staal as well.... and our defense is way better thant Philly and Pittsburg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MDPucks Posted January 16, 2013 Share Posted January 16, 2013 (edited) In unrelated news Єklund (2.3% accurate) is reporting the rumor that Manti Te'o's "dead" girlfriend is being offered to the Devils for Kovalchuck. Edited January 16, 2013 by MDPucks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chimaira_Devil_#9 Posted January 17, 2013 Share Posted January 17, 2013 i don't see them saying otherwise... They will always to improve if they can... but i don't see a coach in NJ saying that the group isn't strong enough... To me a quote saying that basically without Kovalchuk we couldn’t generate any shots in our own practice is a pretty damning verdict on our offense. And that was coming from the head coach and our veteran starting net minder. Like i said early days, and i would like to think Lou is lookind to add something up front, but his "we will go with what we have" (or along those lines) statment a few days ago is a slight concern. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marshall Posted January 17, 2013 Share Posted January 17, 2013 There's no value to be put in those statements. Lou would never give hints about what he is about to do rosterwise, nor what he wants to do. At best you'll get hypotheticals along the lines of "obviously, if we get the opportunity to improve our roster in any way we'll take a look at it". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EdgeControl Posted January 17, 2013 Share Posted January 17, 2013 Can Kovy be triple shifted this year???? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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