Championship – If you have a chance go all in

A Championship is something that is very difficult to win.  We have talked before about tanking to win.  On the other end of that is a good team that has a chance to be a great team.  If you are a really good team and you have a shot to make the championship game you have to go all in to get there.  Some teams get this others do not.  Some teams decide they want to preserve things for next year or down the road.  Each season is its own entity.  There is no next year.  This is true in all sports.  Just because you have a chance this year does not mean that chance will repeat again next  year.

I hear the talking heads all the time speak about how winning a championship is the only thing that gages success.  There is a championship and then there is ever other team in the league Whos season ended in failure.  I hear this all the time.  I also hear that this is the only way to judge a career.  it all seems dependent on how many rings they have.  While I agree this can be the deciding factor between to greats.  I am not sure for over all career that this is the best way to judge.

In each league there can only be one champion each year.   That will mean that there will be great players that are left out of a championship every year.  There are other factors in every sport that contribute to a championship.  Once player alone can not win it.  In basketball you can two it with three players.  Three great players.  One great player and two pretty good ones.  There are different combinations but it can be done.   In hockey you can do it with a pretty good defense or even an ok defense and a great goal tender.  The goal tender does not actually have to be great they have to go on a great run.  In Football you need a team.  One player could make a difference but over all you need a team.  Just the way the game is structured.

I bring this up because of what happened in the NHL today to the Columbus Blue Jackets.  There was nothing that happened today that was not unexpected.  The Jackets lost their top three free agents.  Matt Duchene signed with the Nashville Predators.  Artemi Panarin signed with the New York Rangers and Sergei Bobrovsky signed with the Florida Panthers.  They were all offered more money to stay with the Jackets than they took to move on.  Don’t get me wrong.  They all signed huge deals with their new teams.  The Jackets would not have been able to keep all three of them anyway.  You would think that at least one of them would have stayed.  Only each individual player can say for sure why they actually left.  

The interesting thing is that they left a Blue Jacket team that had a great core of players.  A team that made it to the second round of the playoffs and had a real chance to make it to the final.

This brings me to the debate I heard on the radio today.  Two of the afternoon hosts on 97.1 the Fan were bashing the Jackets for going all in at the trade deadline this year.  I get it.  You are pissed that all three of these players kicked the Jackets to the Curb.  It happens.  This will not be the end of the world.  While I agree that these players will not be the easiest to replace.   But it is the team that they have now.  The Jackets went all in at the trade deadline because they saw a chance to make a deep playoff run.  A playoff run that had the chance to end in a Championship.  It did not happen.  They lost in the second round.  Then got kicked in the gut on the first day of free agency.   I get the anger.

Once everyone gets over the hurt and the anger of losing players like that they will be able to start to focus on next year.  The Jackets have a ton of cap space now to look for other free agents.  They have drafted well and have a deep group of young players in their system.  It hurt them in the draft this year.  It was not a deep draft this year and if you were going to miss out on a first round pick this was the year to do it.

This is not the first time this has happened to a team.  It will not be the last.  I see nothing wrong with a team going all in to try for a championship.  They could have stood pat and tried to trade some at the dead line.  The Jackets would not have made the playoffs if they had done that.  They would not have had the most defining moment in their history with the sweep of the Tampa Bay Lightning.  Yes it sucks they lost in the second round and then lost those three players.  At least they took a chance and tried.  It is possible that it could take a team that goes for it and does not make it some time to recover.  In the long run the fans should appreciate that their team did not just sit and wait for things to happen.  They went for it.  That should be appreciated.