Kraken de Seattle

Domi-Gourde-Eberle
ZAR-Cousins-Niederreiter
McCann-Dadonov-Kase
Donato-Wallmark-Bjugstad

Ghost Bear-DeMelo
Kulak-Stecher
Butcher/MacDonald-Dunn (MacDonald could end up on the top pair by year's end tbh)

MacDonald's minutes were so sheltered last year. He played great, but I would be surprised to see him thrive as a top pairing dman.

I have a question. If you are going for a kickass forward corp, why take GhostBear (who is a major risk) and leave JVR on the table? I know JVR's cap hit is higher, but only a bit and for two years. Plus he is still a fantastic forward.

To fill that GhostBear hole on the defense, you could choose Zadorov or de Haan instead of Subban and use Kinkaid as your backup. Or you could spend more money and swap Vanecek for Petterrson. Or you could hope to sign Ryan Suter, Ian Cole, Dougie Hamilton, or whoever you like best in free agency. Just a thought. This is interesting overall. I am a little surprised a forward-focused draft doesn't feature Tarasenko and/or Duchene as well. But I understand the cap hits are ridiculous.

Yeah FA is probably the best option to fill out the D corps. The original version of this had Pettersson instead of ZAR and Henrique instead of Fleury, but ended up over the 2021 cap, and I felt like I needed a solid chunk for the RFA budget. I probably over-corrected on that front, though. MacDonald did play really easy minutes this year but on the other hand he absolutely slaughtered them, and his AHL numbers are impressive too. Sort of like that one college football team that went undefeated for 3 years straight because they played in an easy conference, it's tough to gauge where he is until he actually gets some competition. CDH is a good idea, too.

JVR definitely makes sense, yeah. At the time I was worried about the cap hit and the potential non-Ghost D corps, but in retrospect grabbing JVR and probably swapping out Domi for cap space would've made the team better.

Senko just feels like a risk Seattle doesn't need to take, given the injuries it's really possible it's a 7 mil cap hit for nothing, and Duchene's term kinda scares me.

I like the possibility of flipping Domi for assets, and CBJ hasn’t left anything available really.

I completely agree on your last paragraph. I left them off my initial mock, but did take RyJo. I am planning on leaving him off my final though.

Not gonna lie, I think the Eberle pick isn’t great…he’s not very flippable and the cap hit / term combo is scary for me. I would go with Aho instead of him, but I know I saw you comment you really liked Eberle’s game.

Eberle is a really good case study in how much more there is to offence than the box score indicates, Hockeyviz actually has his impact on his team's scoring chances as comparable to Connor McDavid. I wouldn't go that far, but he's 92nd among forwards in GAR over the last two-years, which puts him as a top-line player and fine value at that contract, and his xGAR puts him into the top-50 in the same timeframe. He's very good as a complementary piece in transition and excels at springing the rush, and in more set offenses he's great at finding dangerous players in dangerous areas. He's probably not ideal as a lone offensive driver, but he has a long history of extreme success when paired with other strong offensive players, and his D has improved a lot since joining the Isles.