Coping with Defeat - Planning for the offseason

So by now I bet everyone has shaved off their scraggly beards - even I've trimmed down to a standard level that doesn't make me look like a homeless man.  I think it's appreciated

It probably doesn't take a genius to tell that we've all been a little down around here.  Hence the lack of anything but fanposts or quickly thrown together polls/thank-you love fests.  But I'm starting to come around and wanting to write about hockey again.  Only Havlat hasn't updated his twitter feed in 24 hours so there's no real news to pass around.

Watching the two games this weekend really hammers home that the Hawks simply got beat by a much better team - and it's a team that probably no one else can really match right now.  Except for the Ducks I guess... I still don't know how that worked.  I think my Penguins in 6 prediction is probably not going to happen but with any luck hopefully we'll see them at least win one game. Or not.. why delay what looks inevitable at this point? 

The Red Wings Scum have put together a team that's hard to play against.  They're missing two key players in Datsyuk and Draper but you'd hardly know it.  Earlier in the playoffs, Babcock mentioned he can't wait for the salary cap to break up this Hawks squad.  He said "The salaries just creep up, and they can't have all the players.''  Which is true, but it's not like Detroit has much room to move around either.  It's no surprise then that many of us want to see the Hawks replicate Detroit's model with long-term deals that help with the cap hit and some hopeful hometown discounts.  As much as we all hate the Scum - there's plenty to want your team to replicate about them.  Not too much though, lest we become as insufferable as most Detroit fans. 

This all leads into our plans here for the site during the summer.

We'll obviously be looking at the free agent signings both with the Hawks and around the rest of the league.  Next summer is when things will get really interesting but there's plenty of decisions that will affect what the Hawks can offer our own Big 3. 

The three of us are also hard at work figuring out who is in charge of review which player (i.e. - we're all fighting over who gets to review Sharp).  We'll hopefully have those started up by the end of the week.  Then there's the draft and July 1st is obviously the first day of free agency.

So sorry there's not much real news in this.. but it's coming soon.. promise.  Also, SBN gave us a bunch of new tools for the story editor and I wanted to try them out - so thanks for indulging me.