Where’d Raymond go?

Him being Welly. No trading Hodgson!

Right, that’s why I said keeping him around is fine. But trading him assumes someone would want him and he’s a single year removed from being ignored on waivers twice and now is taking the one team that gambled on him to arbitration. He also left Toronto under bad auspices too, so I’d suspect he’s not as widely regarded by the 29 other GMs out there as Vancouver fans may think.

That aside, what precisely are Wellwood’s wonderful contributions?

Pudge’s 27 points put him in the same family as Jochen Hecht ($2.3 million), Kyle Brodziak ($495,000), Andy Hilbert ($650,000), and Mike Comrie ($3.3 million). The lone difference were his 10 PP goals (55.5% of his total production last year) which you can argue is an anomaly as it’s over double his career best (meanwhile his three PP assists was a career worst). Also at least five of those goals were rebounds off the board that found Wellwood with an open net staring at him.Wonderful timing, but not a skill that’s going to repeat itself year to year. On average, both Hansen and everyone’s punching bag Bernier had better point paces.

Demitra(!) and Hansen blocked more shots. Pudge had the third most giveaways on the team. His plus/minus was 2, good enough for 277th best in the league. And yes he had great face off percentage. So did Yanic Perreault in yester years and he was averaging damn near 12-15 points more a season in less games than Pudge.

If I’m Mike Gillis, I would have offered him a meager raise and said “look, last year was nice but you still need to improve all around. Show 08-09 wasn’t a fluke and we’ll talk serious contract last year.” A similar tact he he did with SOB and SOB played along.

What’s Wellwood do? No doubt his agent is gunning for Hecht money. So this team could be more financially handicapped – making it that much harder for Gillis to retain Luongo or fix the remaining holes in the lineup – based on nothing more than faceoffs and the presence of mind to get the Salo ricochet off the boards on the PP?

I’m not convinced at all either of these can be (a) duplicated by Wellwood and (b) replaced by someone else. And we’re staring at the CHL player of the year who can play in the exact same position and brings (again on paper) far more to the table. It’s a gamble either way, but Pudge chose this path. If the arbitrator rewards him anything about the 1.5 million range, I eagerly await Gillis telling him to go piss up a flagpoll and walk away.