hehehehe

if you take out the word potential then Burke doesn’t make the deal. But when the chance of giving up 2 top 10 picks was just that, a chance, it was a risk worth taking. If Kessel, Beauchemin, Komisarek, etc made us a good enough team to only give up the 11th overall pick each year or better then we dominate the deal.

His time here is really done. It’s not all his fault though. Like I said Burke and Wilson put this guy on such a massive pedestal that it grew his ego out of his head and put an enormous amount of pressure that he wasn’t ready to handle.

One question is how do you remove his captaincy? Is it going to create more drama in the dressing room by removing the captaincy from a player and giving it to another? Most captains get traded rather than demoted.

Not only is he not fit to be a captain, I don’t even think he’s much of a leader, and above all, may not even be decent top line pairing d-man.

The Phaneuf that the NHL saw in his early years are gone forever, it’s one thing for him to have one off bad year but we have had at least 4 years of him not regaining the presence he had back in Calgary, and it’s been so long that he may never get it back again.

Half of the blame falls onto Wilson and Burke for throwing the pressure onto him, and the other half goes to Phaneuf for not containing the pressure and letting it get to his head, he completely forgot about the defensive side of the game and focused too much on the offensive side and was costing the team and was not a good mentor for Schenn, thus leading to his struggle as well.

He can’t hit the net worth a damn, he has no concentration, why is shot power soooo important to him??? he took out Lupul for 6 weeks and nearly took out his replacement in JVR. He is also slow as hell, you don’t have to have Kessel speed but should be able to keep up, there aren’t too many players in this league that Phaneuf can keep up with in a foot race, and always gets out of position, an 8 year vet like him should be more responsible.

It’s time for him to move on, he’s hurting us more than helping with his 25+ minutes of ice time.

I say trade him at the deadline, this is a serious problem, if you want, demote him to our 3rd or 4th d-man but he’s killing us being out on the ice for that long with his decisions.

Perhaps one of these players make Colborne expendable and we can use him a package deal to acquire a real no.1 centremen. I don’t know if Colborne will be a true no.1 might as well use his trade value.

if once, just once he responded himself to teams punishing Kessel, or Grabo, or the goalie, or Liles, I think it will go a long way. Right now he is so concerned with staying on the ice.

I personally think he needs to be a little nastier, be a little more unpredictable. Like when Crash Davis said in Bull Durham….”I don’t know where this pitch is going”, i think that applies to Dion.

I know people have liked his simplified game, but he really does need to be less predictable. He needs to go nutso once in a while, be it seeking deadly hits or fighting for his mates. I think that would really cement the fact this is a team or becoming more a team.