Was Arland Bruce the pickup of the year? Even if he is not catching in a game his mere presence seems to be openning things up exactly as the Lions required.
He has been a huge pick-up... obviously on the field (not much of a surprise), but off the field as well (not your typical comment for Arland)!
Yes.. I don't care how ti-cats fans want to spin it, he should have never been traded away from Hamilton (or Toronto for that matter, but that's besides the point). His acquisition took a lot of pressure off Shawn Gore especially. Teams don't double team Geroy as much anymore and Bruce can still play himself. It's not like he wasn't in top 3 in receiving last year or anything..
Great pickup for the Lions and they didn't even give up anything substantial.
Look at the record before he joined the team, then look at the record after.
He's not responsible for all of it, but there HAS to be a correlation.
I think he definitely feels someone upstairs likes him.
Great pickup by BC. The only problem is who to play on my fantasy team, I have both Bruce and Simon!
I picked 5, but more on the "big positive impact" part than the "pickup of the year" part. He is the pickup of the year via trade, but it's not like he has any competition. If you want pickup of the year including things other than trades, it's definitely not Bruce. But he has been huge for BC.
as far as the record to start goes, i might just win a bet i had. I bet a friend they would be at best 3-6by midpoint, but be in contention for 1st by the end of the year. they have been late blossomers the past few years.
His talent added to the other young recievers who are improving with each game simply gives too much for most secondaries to handle. He is dangerous on his own and opens up chances for others, great pick up!
Trading Bruce was a win win for both parties.Hamilton has PLENTY of WR's that can either this year or sometime in the future be all stars, why would we want to hang onto a massive paycheck/ego/guy who couldn't catch anything this year?
On the other hand, BC get's a skilled veteran to work with the young receivers and is a guy that can play well now, he always seems to do better when changing work environments.We don't miss him in the slightest, we have a new favourite WR in Chris Williams, at least HE signed an autograph for me and it only took 1 day of practice vs. however long Bruce was in Hamilton (still didn't get it).
I am glad Bruce is playing well. I never thought the Cats should have traded him, and Obie is an idiot for doing it. Part of me, and not a small part either, hopes that Bruce helps lead BC to the Grey Cup. You can't spin this trade positively in the Ti-Cats favour. With Bruce, the Cats would be a better team. Period! I hope Obie chokes a little every time Bruce makes a catch for the Lions.
Funny, because not only do I have Bruce’s autograph on my jersey, but I also have numerous pictures with him. Wasn’t really hard to get either. I just went up to him and asked. He was more than happy to do it.
And please don’t say “we don’t miss him in the slightest.” I know plenty of Ti-Cat fans who think that trading him was the stupidest thing the team could do. You don’t speak for everyone, and there are plenty of us that do miss him, and miss him quite a bit.
Last game, when Williams was being blanketed, Glenn was ineffective, and the Cats lost convincingly to Winnipeg, you sure seemed like you could have used Bruce. Not at WR, mind you, but at slotback. The way I see it, Khari Jones misused Bruce this season, which made him look bad, and then management traded him away, gambling on the ability of young receivers like Williams to step up in a year in which the team has championship aspirations. Neither move was particularly astute IMO.
As an analogy, I’ll use the Kerry Watkins situation in Montreal. Watkins missed significant time with injury, during which our receiving corps (Richardson, Green, Bratton, London, Whitaker) proved it could do just fine without him. He’s the oldest and most expensive of our receivers, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him cut loose in the offseason. However, you don’t trade a proven 1000-yard receiver like Kerry midseason if you’re gunning for the Grey Cup, because you never know when that receiver’s experience will be the extra little push you need in a critical game down the stretch or in the playoffs.
Bingo! Sadly, some Tiger-Cat fans (and I was one of them) have been indoctrinated with this “In Obie We Trust” stuff. But if you look at some of the moves he’s made recently, he’s missed more than he’s made. Getting Chris Williams for Prechae Rodriguez was a steal, as was signing Marcus Thigpen (both came from Saskatchewan, which says more about them, I think, than it does about Obie). And he did sign Cobourne, but that was because of money, IMO. If Montreal offered him similar money, he’d still be an Alouette.
But then there are his misses. I’ve said my piece about Bruce, so I don’t need to say more.
But just as big might be the moves he’s made in the secondary. I think he’d probably like to take back the trade that sent Chris Thompson to Edmonton for Maurice Mann. I bet he’d also like to take back cutting Jykine Bradley and not re-signing Geoff Tisdale. None of those guys are perennial All Stars, but a secondary featuring those three, Ryan Hinds and Milt Collins would look a lot better than what the Tabbies have now.
Many Tiger-Cat fans seem to think that Obie can do no wrong, but his recent moves have me questioning him. The trading of Arland Bruce was just the latest move that left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I didn’t like it then and I like it even less now.
Definitely. And the Ti-Cats are a better team with Bruce no matter what anyone says. Other than Williams and Thigpen, none of their receivers have been a factor in any recent games. The Ti-Cats could definitely use Arland Bruce in their line-up right now.
Had the Cats gotten something in return – say, a useful DB – I wouldn’t be as appalled by the trade. But all Obie got was a draft pick. If you look at how many third-round picks actually become something, the number is small. And NONE of them have the impact that Arland Bruce has had during his career.
I get sick every time I see him catch a pass knowing that he should still be doing that for the Tiger-Cats. Ti-Cat fans on the forums seem to think this was a great trade, but fans from other teams see this trade for what it was: a fleecing. With Bruce, the Cats would be a better team. I doubt they’d be 7-7. It was a stupid move. He should still be in Hamilton, and I will never move off that belief. You just don’t trade a player of Bruce’s calibre when your goal for the season is the Grey Cup.
They’re not a factor right now because our offensive scheme won’t let them be.Dave Stala had 7 TD’s in 7 or less games and was dominating the early season, Mo Mann is holding his own, Bakari Grant and Aaron Kelly have made very impressive plays on a regular basis, and Glenn McKay is stepping up beautifully in Matt Carter’s absence.I fail to see why we should’ve kept Bruce and his big fat salary when he was literally dropping football after football and going out every 2 minutes with an injury.He was playing totally uninspired, the trade is what sparked him.We need the cap room to work on other areas of the team, not WR where were literally bursting at the seams with talent.The reason Glenn’s doing so poor is not because of his WR’s but because our OL desperately misses our anchor in Hage and because our Offensive play calling is so repetitive and vanilla.Who can honestly say that BC would’ve given someone like Stanley Franks for Bruce who has about 1-2 more years left in the tank?
As for the autograph situation, I first tried to get his at an after game autograph session.I was the very last in the Bruce line but it was the one I wanted the most, the clock had run out and the players were finishing up and he started to leave even though I was still standing there the last 1 waiting and I say “hey man, your like my favourite player, can I just get a quick signature?” and he just shrugs and says “sorry man, I gotta go.” I ask again and say “seriously dude, it’ll just take one second”, “sorry I gotta go.I’ll catcha later.”
Next time is at Jack Astors for the Ticats meet n greet thing at the beginning of every season.This time I simply ask for a picture while he seemed to be standing around doing nothing, this time me my friend and my sister were there.So I ask and he says “yeah hang on, i’ll be with you in a sec.” 30 minutes later he’s table to table and never came back to us.We even tried calling his name and he apparently didn’t hear us.
Next time the following year, again at Jack Astors he was hanging in the back pretty well ignoring everyone there just talking to his fellow team mates and doing a little DJ work.I asked if he would sign my new Baggs jersey and again he claimed he was too busy even though he was just leaning against the wall hiding the whole night.He’s the only CFL player that’s EVER done anything like that to me and it sort of reminds me of trying to get an autograph from T.O. when he was a Bill.
Bruce will show up big on camera but that’s about it.
You know who was on the team for most of Stala’s TDs? I’ll give you three guess and the first two don’t count. Also, guess who has more yards that Stala now? Again, same three guesses.
The guy has done NOTHING since Week 2. He has been a complete nonfactor. I won’t list all the players that have more yards than Mann, but it’s a lot. This is the guy that the Cats should have traded.
So impressive that they rarely see the field. They’ve made some nice plays, but not nice enough that Bruce was expendable.
MacKay, who I like very much, has nothing to do with Bruce. MacKay would still be on the field if Bruce were on the team because MacKay is filling in for Carter, who was on the field when Bruce was on the team.
I could say the exact same thing about Maurice Mann. But the Cats should have kept Bruce because teams trying to win a Grey Cup DO NOT trade productive, veteran players who formed the nucleus of their team. If Bruce was so over the hill, why was he given a contract extension in the off-season? His talent didn’t leave him from March to July. The team’s plans didn’t change between March and July. He was considered valuable enough to extend, but expendable five months later? You stick with your players. Also, he seems to be pretty healthy in BC.
That is a specious and unprovable argument. He was in a funk, a funk he had been in before. He didn’t score his first TD in 2010 until Week 4. He didn’t have a big game until Week 5. Thinking he was done because he had a couple of bad games is ridiculous. Perhaps he just needed to get used to the new scheme the team was using. You can say now that the trade sparked him, but you have no idea if he would have done the same while still with the Cats.
And what have the Cats done with this mythical cap room? First off, you have no idea how much cap room the Tabbies have; none of us do. Player contracts are no made public. Everything we know is simply rumour. But even if the Tabbies needed room, they have done nothing with that room.
Couldn’t these same problems help explain Bruce’s poor start? Vanilla, repetitive play calling would hinder him just as much.
You have no idea how many more years Bruce has left. If in three years he’s still playing at an elite level (you know, like his teammate Geroy Simon is doing at 36) then will you change your tune?
This will go down as one of the worst trades in league history, up there with the Argos trading Bruce to Hamilton. It was a horrible trade, and based on how each team has played since the trade, it looks like history will agree with me on that.
The fact of the matter is, you simply do not trade an All-Star receiver for peanuts. You either get something tangible for him or you keep him. The Cats got peanuts, the Lions have turned their season around and are the current favourites to win the Grey Cup, and the Cats are further from their goal. I’d say the trade was a complete loss for the Cats.
All stars get thrown away all the time.Ex., Jeremaine Copeland, Charles Roberts, Zeke Moreno, Casey Printers, Avon Cobourne, Derek Armstrong, etc.
It's the way of the league, it was inevitable that Bruce would play better going elsewhere.It happens all the time in pro sports, it's called getting re-inspired and reinvigorated.How do you know that his dropsies and nagging injuries wouldn't have continued to this point of the season?Sorry.We have plenty of talent at WR and it's time to move on, ie. Mo Mann traded for Dee Webb.Even Obie knows where our weaknesses and strengths are.
Ps. Don't you think that if Obie could get a good-great player or a higher draft pick he would've done so?We traded a 3rd rounder FOR Bruce and we got a 3rd rounder back.Bruce has 1-2 more years, take that to the bank.
Mo Mann's and Bruce's trades were not due to lack of their talent's, god knows they've got plenty of it.But when you have a SOLID group of youngsters coming up and you can free up some cap space to patch the glaring holes on the other side of the ball, you have to do it.This isn't Madden 12 where you can turn Salary cap off.
PS.Ps.
My reasoning behind Bruce's departure in 1-2 years is based on this.How many times has he been traded around.3-4 times now?How many team's were lining up at the door when we aquired him.2 maybe 3?How many this time.Just BC.How many when his dropsies and huge salary start to wear thin in BC.0.Who's going to want to pay top dollar for an ego driven, 2 year wonder, 35-36 year old WR?
Simon is a much better player, that's why he's a lifetime Lion, that's why he's ready to break Stegall's records and that's why if the time ever comes he'll still have a market and Bruce won't.
BC would have turned it around no matter if they acquired Bruce or not... so I don't think he has had a major impact on how the Lions are performing right now.