In my mind, Feaster accomplished one good thing:
He hired Bob Hartley
Feaster was hands-off at the draft, so it's hard to defend him using that unless you're saying "Well, he let the scouts do their job."
He made a few mistakes, but every GM makes mistakes, his were just a little more pronounced because they were A) done in a hockey market and B) done at a time when the franchise needed every move to be a win. This includes poor trades and bad contracts. He got rid of some NTC which was a positive, but it's not necessarily an accomplishment to just let bad contracts expire and not put an NTC into every new one you replace it with. The NTC issue was a huge mistake by Sutter, but if you're defending Feaster by saying "well, he didn't make that same mistake" then that's kind of altogether meaningless. In business, you don't get credit for NOT screwing up. The expectation is that you don't. That's your job.
He, in my estimation, lost every trade he made. A couple were due to extraneous factors that made it more difficult, but I'm unaware of any trade he completed where he got anything more than the absolute bare minimum you would expect in return.
He moved out quality players because of "cap jail" but grossly overpaid (or acquired overpaid) a slew of players that were significantly worse.
Feaster was the very definition of a below-average GM. He wasn't awful. He just didn't do anything to significantly improve the team. After two years of him at the helm, the Flames were worse in almost every respect, minus coaching and drafting, one of which Feaster took admittedly no credit for at the time.
Defend Feaster or trash Feaster, it doesn't matter. He was nothing more or less than a below-average GM. He did some good, he did a little more bad. He didn't save this team in any way that any other GM in the league could have, and he didn't ruin this team in any way that any other GM in the league might have (except for maybe Garth Snow). He's gone. The Flames survived.
That's all I got.
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