On the Edmonton Oilers and Milan Lucic …
Ryan Rishaug: “Retaining salary is an option, or taking tough contract back, but Oil should be cautious IMO to give up too much to move him. They need wingers, and if he bounces back could still be valuable. They bet on him once, why spend assets to cut bait so quickly? unless …”
Ryan Rishaug: initial thought on a potential Milan Lucic trade that he’d be hard to trade unless they took back another bad contract, but ….
1. Cap going up a notable amount opens space for teams
2. DSP/Wilson/Reaves effectiveness deep in playoffs
3. General Expectation of a bounce back after such a tough year for Lucic.
4. Seldom does anybody mess with Connor McDavid physically. (164gp last 2yrs)
The game is obviously changing but there is no question that his physical presence is a deterrent.
Ryan Rishaug: “Retaining salary is an option, or taking tough contract back, but Oil should be cautious IMO to give up too much to move him. They need wingers, and if he bounces back could still be valuable. They bet on him once, why spend assets to cut bait so quickly? Unless they are big game hunting for a fix on the blue-line and his money is in the way of doing something bigger. We shall see.
On the Vancouver Canucks and the 2018 Draft …
Mike Zeisberger: According to GM Jim Benning, the Canucks are planning on adding to their defensive prospects at the draft. With the Canucks drafting at No. 7, defensemen Noah Dobson, Quintin Hughes and Evan Bouchard could be available.
“We want to take the best player. We would like, in a perfect world, if the best player is a defenseman at No. 7. We have a lot of depth at forward. We’ve drafted a lot of forwards the last few years. We feel like we have some real good forwards coming. In a perfect world, if the best player was a defenseman it would be the perfect scenario.”
Benning when asked if they could be looking to move up or down in the draft.
“We’re going to look at all of our options. I think typically it’s been hard to move up. You look at past drafts you hardly ever see anyone move up into the top five. I don’t know if that changes this year or not. We’ll talk to the teams above us but we’ll talk to the teams behind us too. There’s certain players in this draft we feel strong about that maybe if we can trade down and still get the player we really like and add a pick, we’d look at that too.”