Originally Posted by theoforever
So, to sum it up the Sven situation in the most jaundiced possible way:
Feaster handed keys to the city, and overhyped the kid by calling him the team's #1 prospect at a time when they genuinely didn't have any better prospects in the system.
Burke disliked the kid from the start and created a rift with the kid by stupidly running to the media and criticizing the kid, something that never should have been done without confronting him in person first, which any reasonable person would assume actually did happen, but I am not being reasonable, so I refuse to assume that.
Apparently, Treliving did little to improve the situation, because he mysteriously did not use his magical power to make Baertschi play better.
Hartley picked on the kid for every mistake by making him play on the fourth line, which is a totally unreasonable thing to do when you have three better LWs in the lineup.
As for Sven, he developed entitlement and attitude issues which also got played out in the media, but that's only a bad thing when management does it, not when a player does it.
To his credit, he tried under protest to correct it, plus he improved his defensive play at the cost of becoming less effective offensively, only to be punished by Bob for every mistake, since he made few positive contributions on the ice to offset those mistakes.
So, he asked to be traded, who wouldn't.
So thanks to Burke and Baertschi we lost a good prospect who was running out of time and had not improved his play for three straight years, and Van got a talented young player who is a defensive liability, will soon be waiver-eligible, and thinks he should be handed a top-six roster spot to haunt us for the next decade by tearing up the Swiss League, given the high probability that he is just another in the long list of players who are too good offensively to keep in the minors, but not good enough all-round players to play a top-six role in the NHL.
Flames organization completely mishandled Sven by treating him the same way they treated several other prospects who responded by passing him on the depth chart and establishing themselves on the team.
If I didn't know better, I would have thought we were talking about Oiler brain trust instead of spinning propaganda to make the Flames look as bad as possible.
Good job of grossly misrepresenting the whole situation.
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