17to85

And this is where your wrong.. the law has the limit for drunk driving set so low that I think you are wrong. I can drink 4 beers feel 100% fine but if I had to take a test I'd blow over, get someone baked you think they're ok to drive compared to having a couple beers? The people who go get themselves completely **** faced and drive are pretty much the biggest pieces of garbage on the planet, but impaired is impaired and if I'm too impaired to drive after a few beers then you better believe that people who drive stoned are too impaired to drive.

Impaired is impaired, I have absolutely 0 tolerance for people driving when they are not in the right mindset. Too many people can't drive properly at the best of times get the **** heads who take mind altering substances off the road entirely and we're all safer for it. It's this attitude that "pot is fine I can drive" that is the worst thing. If people want it leagalized going to have to be responsible about it.

Name a big time D that could be had for Yakupov or Eberle or Gagner because those are the only ones they can really afford to trade. I'll wait because your list is going to suck. Like I said they don't need any and every defenseman out there, they have lots of guys who can play a top 4 role, they specifically need someone who can play effectively as the top defenceman on a team and those guys are hard to trade for. They'd be better off targetting an older free agent player to be honest. They aren't an exciting team, they used to live and die by the PP but Eakins came in and torpedoed that, otherwise it's Hall and who ever is on his line with no secondary scoring. Here's something Craig Mctavish said about the bottom 6 forwards on that team last year and it's still pretty true today "The best you can hope for with a lot of those guys is that they're a non factor in a game"

The concern here would be that the coaches and management appear to be on different pages. Coaches and management should all be on the same page here. How can you say that? Teams players before TC all the time. Typical over reaction. Hey I'm simply commenting on the rumours that the coaches and management had a difference opinion on the player. With a defensive coordinator who has failed as many times as Etchevary has I am not giving him the benefit of the doubt. I'll give him a chance this season but I ain't expecting radically different results from what he has shown in the past. And to add to that coaches and management should always be on the same page. There are two ways to build a team, you either build a system around the players you have, or you find players who fit the system you're going to run. Anything else and you wind up with seasons like we saw the last couple years.

Under rated team by a lot of people. Much more talent there than people give them credit for. Lots of Nashville fans used to swear that Suter was the better defenceman than Weber. Koivu is just a good all around hockey player, Pomminville is a good solid hockey player who is better than he gets credit for as well, they have a lot of good young players. A classic case of a team that no one gives a damn about so they don't realize how good they can be.

LOL this reminded me of a story a friend of mine told me about how his 12 year old son had a bunch of his friends over for his birthday party. My friend was at the barbecue all afternoon grilling up tons of burgers and hotdogs as of course 12 year old boys can eat constantly, when this little pale kid comes up to him and asks him just for a hamburger bun and some carrots. Apparently his parents were forcing him to be a "vegan" and he couldn't eat any meat. My friend said this kid had no energy, and could barely play with the other boys. He looked pale and so unhealthy. I get it if you believe in this organic thing and want to waste your money on it, but turning your poor kids into vegans is just plain wrong. You're just showing your ignorance on this topic more and more. There are Vegans who are elite athletes, run marathons, win weight lifting competitions. Some pale kid...give me a break! Of course there are, however you have to actually put a lot of work into it if you want to make sure your body is getting all the nutrients it needs. If you just eat vegetables you're not going to be all that healthy. What really bothers me is the notion that people get that certain lifestyles are healthiest. You can be healthy eating a hell of a lot of variety of things, it's just a matter of having a good nutritional background to actually understand what you need and where you can get it from.

He always kind of struck me as one of those guys who is a great athlete but lacks stuff between the ears. Not my favourite kind of player.

The concern here would be that the coaches and management appear to be on different pages. Coaches and management should all be on the same page here.

Yeah Buff is so good at D they moved him to forward, come on. Young defencemen isn't what the Oilers needed either, they have plenty of those of their own. They need quality veteran players and the cost of doing business for those kinds of players is very high because every team wants more quality veteran defencemen. Like I said, it's easy to say "should have traded players for a defenceman" much harder to actually come up with a deal that makes sense for both teams. You're right. Trouba would certainly not have befitted the Oilers. If they Oilers are 'too young' and need veterans, thats no ones fault but their own. Its not like they were surprised to have so many young players on their team. Enstrom isnt a "young" d-man and would instantly have been Edmonton's best. Bogo is young and would also be the Oiler's best D man. Buff would have been a lot more valuable to Edmonton as a D than he was to us. And yes I am aware he was moved to forward, which is why I would have tried to soak Edmonton for him 1.5 years ago. was Trouba available for anything even remotely reasonable? The young D comment was in reference to the Pens having young guys they are willing to move. The young guys the pens are willing to move are prospects of the same level as what the Oilers already have. No the point here is that Buff is not the kind of D you make a big move for because he's got flaws as a defenseman and players with flaws are ones to take for cheap but don't give up assets for. With Enstrom and Bogosian again you have guys that teams would like, but not for a big price because they have flaws. You would have tried to soak Edmonton sure, but Edmonton was not looking to make a trade where they got soaked. That's what you're missing here. Losing a guy like Enstrom or Bogosian from the Jets really trashes their depth on D so they would have needed a big payment to do it, but Edmonton doesn't have a lot of depth to be moving it out. Let's throw out a hypothetical here, let's say they traded Eberle for Bogosian... how good is a team with Bogosian as their best defenseman? Now you've taken away Edmontons 2nd best point producer, who fills that role? Hemsky who had grown stagnant in Edmonton? Yakupov who is on the coaches **** list and struggled in every way last year? Ryan Jones who is barely a 4th liner in the NHL anymore? Luke Gazdic? Tyler Pitlick?

IMO a prospect doesn't mean depth. Depth to me is having players around who can fill in if you're in a pinch. The Jets, for example, have a lot of depth on D, with eight or nine guys who can play in the NHL. The Oilers don't have six guys who are good enough to play D in the NHL. If I was the Oilers GM, I'd bring in a guy like Matt Greene . He's big, tough, good in his own end, & he probably won't cost a lot of money. I think he'd help those young dmen a lot. Tom Gilbert is another UFA they should look at. Bringing them back would fix a couple of their previous mistakes when they let those guys go. But they do have lots of guys who can play in the NHL, including some of those prospects. What they lacked was someone who could handle big responsibilities on the back end. Hell Marincin and Klefbom were arguably the most impressive defenders for Edmonton last year, they absolutely count as depth, but it's not just for right now you have to look at, when you're building a team you have to look at the future as well. When you have a lot of players on an upwards development curve who will be forcing their way into the lineup soon you don't want to be locked into a bunch of older players long term for big money and then be unable to move them out. They had to pay Ference a hell of a lot of money for significant term to get him there, what would they have to pay to get someone better than that? Trading Gilbert was one of the stupidest things Tambellini did, especially for a worse player, that's part of the reason why he was fired. Gilbert wasn't perfect but he was a guy like Petry who could muddle his way through a top pairing without completely embarassing himself even if he was miscast in the role. And hell Matt Greene is a prime example of why you don't make knee jerk moves. Matt Greene and Stoll couple young players in areas the Oilers thought they had some depth at for Vishnovsky. Vishnovsky was really good for the Oilers but he didn't want to stay there so they traded him for Whitney who was good for a while but an injury case and his play fell off quickly and they got nothing for him. Meanwhile the team now would kill to have Greene and Stoll back. When you don't have great depth making trades can hurt you long term, that's exactly how the Oilers got into the problems they are in. Build your depth first then start making trades. The only place the Oilers really do have depth right now is among their D prospects. Tambellini mismanaged the veterans very badly, but he was fired for doing so, trading away the young players willy nilly isn't going to help the Oilers in the long term, better to stay the course with them and build around them. If they are keen to add a veteran defensemen through trade they should be trading some of their defence prospects for it not the forwards. Paajarvi for Perron last year was a good move because you are switching one player for another at the same position and you're not filling one hole to open another. Too many holes in that system (not just the roster, but the system) to be trading from one area to fill another.

It's not trying to play god or knowing better than nature, it's about trying to mitigate the adverse effects nature can have. There's a reason all these methods came into use, it makes it easier to grow more food in the same space and you don't lose your crop if you get a pest problem. Sure you could quite easily grow food without using any of that stuff, but prices would go up and they'd fluctuate more and there would be more shortages. Doing things the natural way is great, nothing tastes quite as good as fresh stuff from the garden however the way the world is today you can't go back. Everything is too centralized.

It's a numbers game. They have a lot of defencemen kicking around with definite NHL upside. Marincin, Klefbom and Maybe Nurse (because he was really good in preseason last year) could all force their way into the NHL in the next year or two, they already have Petry and Schultz as younger guys (Petry being a veteran when he's only got a couple years of NHL play under his belt as well) Ference is there for multiple years... That's not even taking into account players like Musil or Simpson and a couple others who have been having success in the development system. If these guys start to force their way in that's more guys than you have room for. Meanwhile who are the forwards knocking on the door... Lander who can score tons in the AHL but can't get it to translate to the NHL, Pitlick who has limited offence but looks like he might be able to play a bottom 6 game... except he's hurt all the time. Arcobello an undersized centre... who else? few guys who might turn into bottom 6 guys eventually but no guarantees. Forwards are a much bigger cause for concern as an OIler fan than the defense. Go look at how many goals that team actually scored, look at how many of them Taylor Hall factored in on. If Taylor Hall doesn't have a big night that team can't score goals. It's not about keeping the puck out of their net, it's about not being able to play offence.

it's not about having 24 hours a day fresh and exciting content, it's about having the options when there is a full schedule. For example this past weekend TSN had basketball and TSN2 had nascar, in the mean time the hockey they were showing was starting and they had no where to show it. Now obviously they're losing hockey but they'll fill that void with another sport.

And that is why I'm so sick of hearing about it, because it's all bullshit. It's a lack of effort from the national media actually looking at the team. They see Hall and Eberle and RNH and Yakupov and just assume that's all they have. The deepest part of their organization is actually defense prospects. They have crap forward depth and their centre depth is an embarassment, but in a couple years they're going to have too many defencemen needing spots in the NHL and will have to move some of them.

Again you missed the part where their defense is already going to be shored up through the system right? They could use a veteran to play for a couple years on the top pair to buy them some time for Nurse to round himself out, he's a pretty raw prospect right now. I'd love to see them add someone like Markov but no clue how feasible that is. This whole idea that the Oilers need any D available is so sickening, they need some quality forward depth a lot more than they need defensive depth. RIght now they're a team that lives and dies based on how far Taylor Hall can drag them in a game.

Yeah Buff is so good at D they moved him to forward, come on. Young defencemen isn't what the Oilers needed either, they have plenty of those of their own. They need quality veteran players and the cost of doing business for those kinds of players is very high because every team wants more quality veteran defencemen. Like I said, it's easy to say "should have traded players for a defenceman" much harder to actually come up with a deal that makes sense for both teams.

I could add that there have been other health benefits not mentioned, such as consistent blood test readings, less coughing and a general turn away from unhealthy eating, and now that you mention it…more power, so I can't offer that as proof, more so dietary choices, but I can safely say that watching what I eat before it goes in, definitely works for us as things turn out. It has not been a one week turn around for us, more so a delving into and learning experience over the last 3 and a 1/2 years. It probably started upon moving here and the close proximity to a farmer's market that is walking distance to our place. So, it has evolved slowly, kinda like the Bomber offence. So can I make the assumption that you've done more than simply switch to organic stuff? Sounds like there's more to it than simply going from non-organic to organic and that there's bigger dietary changes in play here.

I notice you're not naming a top d-man that was available for that price, and no guys like Buff don't count as top d-men. Hell it seems like the most likely guy the Oilers could have got was Cobourn, and that's not exactly a legit top guy either but the flyers didn't want to give him up for a reasonable price either. Something else to consider with Edmonton as well is that they don't really have a lot of depth at forward either so if they trade one of those guys they just make another hole. People like to only look at the NHL team when they look at the Oilers and never look at just how terrible their system was when it all fell apart on them. The problem with the Oilers was the asset management of Tambellini. Turning for example Joni Pitkanen into Eric Cole into Patrick O'Sullivan into Jim Vandermeer into nothing. Or turning Vishnovsky into Whitney into nothing. Or holding onto Hemsky too long that they couldn't get a good return for him. One of the interesting things to see is how in his first year on the job as GM Craig Mctavish basically purged everyone Tambellini had brought in as a free agent or trade. It's easy to say "oh trade someone for a top defenceman" not so easy to find a team willing to move one of those guys for less than a monstrous overpayment.

I wonder if people are going to be willing to sign here if they pick up a reputation of just dropping guys before giving them a chance. The optics just look really sketchy. I don't know that it's gotten to that point yet. There haven't been that many guys cut, and they did get to watch these guys at the mini camp. It's not a real camp, but it can give you a sense of whether or not these guys can run well enough to play on a CFL field. but if it becomes standard procedure what effect does that have long term? And to be quite honest I would hope that these professional football scouts could tell if a guy can run well enough on a CFL field before even offering a contract.

Is it? What changes have you noticed in your health since changing? Ha, I hesitated to post "that word", because I knew it would spark discussion, but that's good…right? As to the health benefits, how about better sleeps, no need for ex-lax (know what I mean?-know what I mean?), and the food is fresh. But I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I can suddenly leap tall buildings or run a few extra miles, but I do know the sense of eating free-range or grass fed products does have a psychological advantage, and to me, that's healthy. But if you want proof, I can't help you there. It's all a personal choice and all I can tell you is, it works for me and my wife. I would question whether those psychological benefits you see are actually benefits or simply the placebo effect in action. I mean if it works for you then more power to you, but I think it's a worthwhile question to explore.

I wonder if people are going to be willing to sign here if they pick up a reputation of just dropping guys before giving them a chance. The optics just look really sketchy.

yeah but trade who? and for who? You think teams were lining up to give quality defencemen for Shawn Horcoff and Ales Hemsky? That's the Oilers problem, they allowed the depth to get so poor that they couldn't make a trade to fill one hole without opening up another giant hole.

LOL - my cousin has an organic orchard here in Kelowna. He says that the mantra of the organic grower here is "we spray at night". The whole organic thing is sooo stupid, but a clever way to get people to pay three times as much for the same food. And I say this having grown up on a farm. If you don't spray, you don't have a crop. And that's just how it is. We've grown food on this planet for thousands of years without having to spray it. I'm not saying some organic growers don't spray their crops, but they're supposed to use organic pesticides that don't contain synthetic compounds. What's the difference between organic and synthetic? They're looking for the same effect just one is coming from less efficient natural sources and one is created specifically to do the job. The reason we spray crops now is to increase yield, grow more food in less space, with the population of the earth growing that is a good thing. They use genetically modified crops for the same reason, higher yield with less area used, which also has the benefits of less energy input to produce that yield. Organic is a fad in my mind that allows people to make themselves feel superior but really the only thing it does is up their food bill. Honestly I think if people are THAT concerned about how their foods are produced maybe they should plant their own gardens and be as self sufficient as possible. Buy your meat directly from a farmer somewhere all that kind of thing. But then again people want the convenience of going to the store and having everything there so they're willing to get scammed by a label.

That's what we're trying to figure out.