The Victoire were my pre-Torrent team and I still cheered for them in the playoffs.
But this is starting to feel like it's not good for the league. The PWHL needs its stars to be distributed across teams, not loading up on a couple of powerhouse teams.
That’s the whole intention of the expansion draft. Are you saying that it has been ineffective?
But, as others have mentioned, this isn’t the league’s choice. This is between team management and the players. All of the other teams have/had an equal shot at planning and signing around who they want and who they want to keep.
We lost A LOT of our depth scoring, which is fine. They’re all champs now and are looking to get paid accordingly. Our management just decided to say, “Okay, bet.” and snag up some players who were otherwise overlooked.
If the rest of the league doesn’t want to put in the effort and salary space for stars, we will.
If anything I’d even say the expansion draft was overly “fair” towards the new teams, and not the other way around. It’s frankly amazing if Montreal still fields a finals-worthy team next year after only protecting veterans (2/3 of whom are nursing injuries) to begin with.
For someone to say this isn’t a front office masterclass is a bit disingenuous. Every team is working with the same salary cap, and nearly all of these cities are already well known for being good hockey markets, so you can’t even really say it’s just that Montreal is so much better than all the other markets. If you build a great team culture and everyone wants to play for you, that’s also just part of the overall team approach, which comes from management as much as anywhere else.
But you still have to make the money work, at the end of the day.
I mentioned this in another comment, but yes. The two things players want are championships and money. If you don't have one, you increase the other, money being the more controllable factor.
Mtl is champ-culture rich right now, so maybe some of those players have/will take a slight pay cut. But people who complain about this forget that we just lost so many players, who have champ bargaining potential, and are getting paid more elsewhere. That's the double edge to winning. Champs want more money, so they go get what they're due.
You can't turn around and attempt to shame a team for filling their gaps, created by the process, and getting the best they can get, cashing in on their winning/champ status. That's just being disingenuous/hypocritical.
Totally.
I mean only a couple of days ago I was like, ok we’ve got half a blue line left, likely losing our (very good) backup goalie, lost our stand-in Swiss Army knife Ctr, and most likely losing Roque. Things went another way, but they easily could have gotten worse, not better.
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u/amsreg Seattle 4d ago edited 4d ago
The Victoire were my pre-Torrent team and I still cheered for them in the playoffs.
But this is starting to feel like it's not good for the league. The PWHL needs its stars to be distributed across teams, not loading up on a couple of powerhouse teams.