Following up on DD's post about untouchable/touchable players, I thought I'd throw the following out there: If you were starting the team from scratch today, and had your pick of five of the current players, who would you take and why? This way, there's no clutter about who is tradeable and NTC's and NMC's, just a very simple premise:
Who is the nucleaus of the team over the next 4-6 years? Who's your Five Alive?!?!?
My five are as follows:
SoS - Do we even need to discuss this?
The Baron - I think his growth was stifled under Q, but there's still time for him to be Hejduk v2.0.
Liles - Getting better every season, IMO. Another who suffered somewhat under the previous regime.
Boods - The cap # alone is reason enough, and I feel that he will continue to improve.
Hensick - A little bit of a flyer on this one, but I like his playmaking skills and his work ethic.
My second tier is filled with guys like Jones, Lappy, Leopold, Guite, Smyth, and Hejduk. That list is longer in the tooth, but are all important cogs for the foreseeable short term.
Anyway, that's where my brain ended up after DD's excellent post, and I thought I'd clutter the front page rather than the comments section, since my take was a tad different.