Quote:
Originally Posted by Split98
Every single successful person has made a mistake. And I'd much rather go with a GM willing to take the occasional risk than one that always goes with the safe bet. It is very easy to point and laugh at the Cervenka signing now, but at the time it was a very interesting grab with potential to be quite a steal... and it cost us nothing. We had 2 Czech born players on the team to help him acclimate, and we were even talking about bringing Jagr in to play with him. There was skepticism, absolutely, but there was also excitement in 'what IF this guy works out?'. It was a good signing, and I really wouldn't hold it against him that Cervenka didn't work out. The dude had a blood clot and missed training camp. Pretty tough to learn a new league and teammates you can't talk to when you miss all of training camp.
I'm confused, are you arguing that the drafting was poor under Feaster? Personally, I'm very happy with his draft results and am expressing that I'm impressed he had the self awareness to let people he trusted advise him on who to draft... which worked out very well. And last I checked, Feaster didn't draft Regehr...
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I think the point that Vulcan is trying to say is, because Feaster isn't a "hockey guy" he doesn't know a center from a winter. Feaster is lucky that he got a talented team of scouts (Poirer, Gaudreau) but unlucky with others (Weisbrod). I think Feaster admitted that he never watched Cervenka or Jankowski play, so while IMO you can't pin either of those transactions on him, its a little frightening when the guy at the top of the food chain doesn't really know the industry so all he can do is hope that his team knows what they are doing. Which IMO is kind of the summary of Feaster's tenure..... the good he did was listen to his experts, the bad is he had to listen to his experts.... and as a result you saw a lot of flip flopping as he is trying to figure out which direction to be a yes-man in. Which I guess is kind of funny, that that summation of all his screw ups forced us to rebuild and get a few top picks. If Feaster was a little better at his job, we might still be stuck with Iginla and trying to make the playoffs.