Tampa Looking Towards The Future
- Updated: September 30, 2018
Tampa’s core young piece, star young stud Charlie McAvoy
Tampa exceeded expectations last year in many peoples eyes. They made the 2nd round of the playoffs and despite losing in 5 games to the Ottawa Senators, they didn’t give up without a fight. So it was very weird to see a team that made so much progress, to tear that team down.
“We rushed our way into competing”, said GM MacPherson. “We should’ve stuck with keeping the rebuild going as even though we had a good team last year, a lot of other big contenders in the east got a lot better while we may have only got slightly better. We want to win but we admittedly didn’t have enough depth to do some real damage so we decided as an organization to tear it down and do it right this time, and we like some of the young core pieces that we have acquired thus far.”
Bringing high potential scoring players in Wahlstrom, Buchnevich, Frost and Kaprizov give the Bolts a bright future with their forward core as they will look to increase their depth in the upcoming draft at the end of the season. The big piece that management is excited about though, is young d-man Charlie McAvoy.
“We wanted to get the kid for a while, but with us competing last year it didn’t make sense for us to give up depth to get another d-man on a d-core that was already strong. With us rebuilding now though, we felt we had to get him as it’s hard to find d-men with potential as high as his on the market, we feel he’ll be a top pairing guy for us for years. We’ll be looking for a potential partner for him in the future but for now we want to build up a young, dynamic forward group”.
Tampa still has star d-man and team captain P.K Subban on the team as well, when asked why he’s still there instead of traded away like most of last years Bolts core GM MacPherson said “We weren’t going to trade him for the sake of trading him. He’s still a very good player and would make a fine addition to any blueline. We don’t mind him staying at all as he can mentor McAvoy and can also help us sell tickets to games at least while we rebuild with his exciting style of play, if he’s here for the duration of his contract we aren’t worried at all as we’ll be saving our cash up for a couple of years so P.K will be a great loyalty guy”.
When asked how long before they think they can get this team to be a threat in the east again, GM MacPherson said “As much as it pains me to say this, we want to be building our team with high end prospects in drafts for at least another 4 seasons I’d say, I’d give us 6 seasons before we are a legit threat again, will learn from my mistakes and not rush this team again”. With Tampa seemingly committed to a rebuild, this team could be a force to be reckoned with in the future.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login