It's Been A While

I bet you'd thought I'd forgotten about my loyal reader, or the Thrashers. I bet you'd thought that I had given up on the blog, not so. Honestly with little going on for a while I went out and got busy on other projects and then when things started to finally kick up I just didn't have enough time to sit down and write stuff down, well...and honestly...maybe a little laziness set in too.

Well I'm back on the beat and hopefully I can keep my schedule clear enough so I can pull out my soapbox on at least a regular basis and make my feelings known on the current state of the Thrash.

Since I've been gone there's actually been a lot of things happen on the front lines in hockey and with the Thrashers. We traded Marty the Party away and saw recent Stanley Cup Champs Dustin Byflugien, Brent Sopel, Ben Eager, Andrew Ladd and prospect Akim Alieu join the organization. We solidified our position in goal with the signing of Chris Mason. We resigned Jimmy Slater and Eric Boulton, saw Pavel Kubina and the Moose find new homes. Got a new coach, and two assistants. Handed out our qualifying offers and oh..lest we forget drafted Alexander Burmistov in the first round.

Prospect camp just wrapped up and the vibe in Duluth is good that several of our prospects are going to give the new coaching staff something to think about when they come to skate in September.

Oh..and then on the broader hockey front lets not forget we're getting ready to enter into week 3 without Ilya Kovalchuk having signed with any NHL team. The reports are still that he's talking to L.A. about signing there but the best offer they've given him is approximately 6.5 million/year for 13 years. Not exactly close to the 100 million dollar offer that Don Waddell offered up back in February. I said it then and I'm glad it actually seems to be born out as true, his agent, Jay Grossman had way oversold him on his value to NHL teams. In fact at this point the team that seems to have valued him the most was the first one he snubbed.

So as we've seen in my little recap there's plenty of happenings to talk about and I'll probably make some posts in the next few days and weeks trying to kind of summarize and recap those moves, but mostly they've been talked out so I'll spend most of my effort at this point moving forward.

We're moving into the dog days of the off season when there's not much to talk about, other than the aforementioned Kovy watch. It seems to me that the Thrashers are probably close to finished with any off season moves, I'm thinking at this point anything they do will most likely be considered depth signings.

Stay tuned for my next post, where I'll actually focus on one aspect of the team and talk about it..and no it won't take another four months before I write it. To you my loyal reader..thank you for not forgetting that I'm out here..and I apologize you had to read this.