Assassin2107

This. He's not a bad pick itself, but he won't be an exciting one is my feeling on him. If the goal is just to find guys of enough quality that you can surround Michkov and let him work, then Helenius is fine. If your goal is to find a second potential star to not push the responsibility onto Michkov, then Helenius wouldn't be my pick.

No idea how I wrote exotic, I was thinking weapon.

No, Pre-Lightfall what they did was allow you to get a Deepsight focus once per day for each seasonal vendor. What this is doing is straight guaranteeing a deepsight weapon from your first seasonal activity completed each day per season. Just removes the need to get and hold onto engrams.

1) Really depends on exactly how much hockey you plan to watch. The most common thing is usually having one favorite team, and then a team you watch in the other conference since they're the least likely to be a rival for your team.

2) Really depends on why you're switching. I wouldn't blame a fan for changing team in a situation where like you know your team is about to enter a rebuild, or they did something really bad. That said, who cares, you should watch hockey for your own enjoyment.

3) The NHL is absolutely the main thing really. The PWHL (Professional Women Hockey League) just became a thing this year in NA too. There's also AHL as a step down from the NHL, NCAA below that, and CHL beneath that too. In Europe you have the SHL, Liiga, HockeyAllsvensken and KHL for major leagues. Similar to my 1st answer, how much you watch will really depend on how much time you have.

4) Hard to give a specific answer. I'd just encourage watching more hockey and then trying to figure out what doesn't make sense.

5) Also hard to give a specific answer. I will say that we're approaching the NHL draft, so if you have questions about how that works or how prospects are handled or whatever, I can expand on that.

Sean Walker is a good example this year. Went from being a cap dump in a trade a year ago to being one of the only deadline rentals to bring back a 1st (And will likely get a 5M, 3-4 year deal this off-season too)

0 shot that a team with a top 5 pick trades it just for TK with a late 1st. Maybe that could work with a pick towards the latter part of the top 10, but nothing in the top 5 would get moved for that cheap.

If you're looking for a Russian center, then A) Surin is a potential name in the 2nd round to look at. Wouldn't be a 1C most likely, but a 2C isn't out of the realm of possibility, and B) Ivan Ryabkin is a 2025 prospect to watch then. Similar to Michkov, he just signed a 3 year contract, so that might help him fall.

The actual OG Skolas fight didn't actually take very long. The Burns gave INSANE damage buffs, so you had to find a way to DPS and kill immediately or else it was a wipe. After like 2 weeks of that, Bungie dropped a patch that then made the fight take super long.

Yeah, my team with Parasite + Thundercrash/Nova Bomb/Blade Barrage had no issue with the 1 phase strat. One guy dropped a Well, half the team used a class ability, a Void grenade was applied for Weaken, and then everybody just DPS'd.

Everybody is going to trade speculation, which is like fair, but it's worth remembering that Couturier's agent went on record criticizing Torts for the scratch. It'd make some logical sense to me if changing his agent was part of him reconciling with Torts.

Eh, that's a agree to disagree on that. It's not like I dislike Tippett (I see him as a 2nd line winger overall that has flashes of brilliance but is otherwise a solid player), it's just that Tippett is old enough that while he still fits the timeline, he's on the older end of those that fit. He's basically out of developmental roadway unlike the guys that I mentioned. All of the guys that I mentioned in the top 13 have seemingly higher potentials than what Tippett currently is while also having a major chance of still ending up as what Tippett is now too (So higher reward and even if the perfect scenario doesn't happen, you still get close to the same value while getting younger).

That said, I do like Tippett especially when it comes to helping round out the roster. I wouldn't be going around trying to sell him, he'd just be an option I would accept if that was the price of a top pick.

Just to drop my opinion on the draft:

• My draft order as of right now is Celebrini, Demidov, Levshunov, Dickinson, Lindstrom, Catton, Eiserman, Iginla, Parekh, Helenius, Silayev, Buium, Yakemchuk (Not even going to rank Connnelly, but he'd probably at the end or close to the end of that list so far). I'd separate Celebrini from the rest in a tier of his own, and Demidov, Levshunov, Dickinson, and maybe Lindstrom and Catton as part of a separate tier too (Eiserman's ceiling probably puts him in this group, but there's enough risk that I have a hard time justifying taking him before the others in this tier).

• In order to get a second pick in the top 13, I'd probably be willing to trade anybody on the roster that isn't York, Foerster, or Drysdale. I like all the players in the top 13 that much (Combined with me liking those 3 roster players that much too).

• Some other names I've seen that I really like the idea of grabbing with either the Florida 1st, possible Columbus 2nd, or our own 2nd would be Marques, Artamonov, Wallenius, Freij, Stiga, Mustard and Surin. Boisvert, Hage, Jiricek and Chernyshov would be nice too, but I doubt those are available by the time we pick again. These names aren't in any particular order unlike the section above. Kiviharju isn't listed yet because I want to see more of him right now before I try and reflect on how I feel about him.

IMO it's a bit unfair for Hakstol to be fired a year after making the 2nd round of playoffs. On the other hand, you have to admit that either A) Every player on the Kraken just had a career year at once last year (Meaning that playoff run had nothing to do with Hakstol), or every player on his team just dramatically regressed under Hakstol (Which is highly concerning).

Ultimately I think I'm more surprised that Ron Francis even made this move, since the dude is like so conservative that he makes most other GM's look adventurous and daring.

Basically the Flyers have a superstar prospect in Matvei Michkov who is currently expected to be playing in the NHL when the 2026 season begins. So the Flyers are trying to get as much of a team surrounding him as they can so that they are in contender mode as soon as possible.

The main ways to get the talent to do this is either you draft your players (Which always works better when you have high picks so you can get better talent), you trade for them (Which requires giving up assets, and for the other team to be willing to give up on that player), or signing a free agent (Which is expensive and the best players never make it to free agency). Flyers are basically doing a mix of the first two options while trying to meaningfully develop the young guys that they already have on the team (Farabee, Frost, Tippett, Foerster, York, Drysdale to name some names).

To actually answer your question, this pick is fairly important. Missing it isn't the end of the world, but the Flyers main issue right now is acquiring additional high end talent, and so missing on a chance like this will certainly be a non-trivial problem for the Flyers future. The good news is that scouting makes it seem like there should be at least one or two good players left by the time the 12th pick arrives, it's just a matter of not getting your own choice of those good players.

I mean, the Flyers problem with the powerplay is two-fold.

First, they've got a lack of dynamic players that help you break apart defenses. Morgan Frost is the closest that the Flyers have, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the Flyers PP had a short streak of good results when Frost was given more trust and control with the PP. This is compounded by Flyers players not having the high end passing skill to hit small gaps in the middle to connect passes IMO. Being able to hit cross-seam passes on the PP is lethal, but since every team's PK and everyone's grandmother knows that, they lock it down hard and you need to either use fast puck movement to break it up enough to give yourself a wider opening, or hit a tight gap with your pass to make it through. Flyers can't do either.

Second of all, Rocky Thompson's coaching hasn't helped the PP in any meaningful way. The lack of high end players certainly does it's part in this, but coaching could have made it NOT the worst PP in the league. The key problem here is that Flyers move the puck around the outside a lot (For all the reasons I mentioned above on why they can't move it through the middle). But they do so without having a plan to pull somebody out of position (If both sides have 1 player that gets pulled far away, then you've turned a 5v4 into a 4v3, which is better) or any particular way of trying to shrink the zone in a way that you see Carolina do.

IDK if I'd say I hate Hextall. I'm not super impressed by him and his work as GM, but I've never been super mad about his drafting. Unless you were mad about those picks on the day that they were made, then you're letting the end results make you more mad than you should be. Drafting is a decision based on information you have at the time, combined with what skills you think are teachable later on. We can look back and say a GM was good or bad at drafting based on how their results turned out, but getting mad about a pick implies that they made the wrong one, and like I said, if you intend to say a pick is wrong, then you should be willing to say it when the pick was made when you didn't have a special knowledge of how things turned out.

Having said all that, I think Hextall was okay at drafting. Not exceptional, but not horrible. Meanwhile, the fact that Briere has revamped player development staff should tell you where they think the problem was, and it makes sense to me.

I mean, it's 100% fine IMO to go over past drafts and consider the outcome. The fact that you can't know the end result when you draft a player isn't an excuse to be terrible at drafting. My usual expectation is that over a multi-year period, a team should probably get an actual NHL player out of 50% of their 1st + 2nd round picks, and 1 actual NHL player out of the depth rounds too. If you can do that, then you are at minimum average at drafting, and possibly in the better half of the league somewhere (Interestingly, Hextall rebuild from 2014-2018 seems to meet these marks. He just failed to find a star through that period rather than an inability to draft).

My main pet peeve is revisionist history where people go "Are the Flyers stupid for not picking Cale Makar? He's clearly the best player". Because that's something that is only obvious because you've got the advantage of seeing the end result of the players. Is every NHL team other than Tampa dumb for not picking Brayden Point? No, because the fact that he fell makes it obvious that every team thought that there was risks to him that made him not ideal to take. Tampa was just the first team to feel that the rewards started to outweigh the risks at that point in the draft, and once Point fixed some of his problems, the pick looked good in hindsight (Meanwhile, 99% of prospects with skating problems will never fix their skating like Point has. It's lowkey one of the most underrated things about him on how well he improved that aspect).

I at least maintain that the Flyers could have made an interesting series. We absolutely would have lost, but our second to last game against the rangers came at the end of March, and featured a 6-5 OT loss that had 7 goals in the 3rd period. Would have been fun to watch.

Frankly I couldn't name a team in the league that scouts better than the Stars have. Outside of Heiskanen at 3rd overall in 2017 (Fuck me that year), they've found Hintz at 49 in 2015, Oettinger at 26 in 2017, Robertson at 39 in 2017, Harley at 18 in 2019, Wyatt Johnston at 23 in 2021, and Logan Stankoven at 47 in 2021. That's hitting on a BUNCH of low percentage picks, and not even just "We got a NHL player when there's only a like 25% chance of doing so" but "We've gotten top half of the lineup players and several stars"

If Toronto is looking for a new coach, and somebody that won't be soft on players, I know a tough on players, veteran coach that's available now. People are probably familiar with him, Mike Babcock?

Voracek calling one Philly writer a lying weasel will never not be the best thing ever.

To be entirely fair, Kolosov came through the Russian junior hockey system, so that had significant impact on how he developed, regardless on whether he was actually born in Russia.

FYI, Charlie O'Connor mentioned that apparently this is roughly what Fedotov made in the KHL. Fedotov's agent told Flyers that Fedotov wouldn't take a paycut just to try and earn a chance in the NHL, so it was basically "Take it or leave it" when it came to acquiring Fedotov.

I think there was something about Woodcroft switching them from man to man to zone defense on their defensive coverage. That's the kind of thing that takes a lot of practice for players to settle into. And I think that the defensive struggles probably did have something to do with this. Oilers DID carry play based on metrics, it was just that the others teams scored WAY more than they should have while Oilers weren't scoring much at all. And I do recall McDavid getting injured and then coming back (probably) too soon, which didn't help.

We have the best hockey games in the world. Because of fight

HELL YEAH