[Flames Draft Watcher]

OMG I forgot Regehr (who I loved) + Kotalik for Byron + 2nd. We would've been far better keeping Regehr and dealing Sarich who was only making slightly less and was a far inferior defenseman. Regehr was later traded as a pending UFA for even more than Feaster got for him! Embarrassing and it really eroded the quality of our defense and set our organization back. Regehr was traded to try and make a run at Brad Richards who was later bought out of that contract. Meanwhile Sarich was the real cap problem, not Regehr. Imagine if we had actually landed Brad Richards. How much would that have cost us long term? YIKES.

My god was Feaster bad at the whole trading thing. Squandered assets left and right. Lets not forget he's the man reasonable for the length of the Wideman deal as well. That sure handicapped us the past year or two and the cost of the handicap was not worth the couple good years we got out of him. People credit Feaster for not saddling us with bad contracts but he was offering Brad Richards 7+ million and gave Wideman 5.5. He kept Sarich over Regehr. He's overrated by far in that area.

Feaster made very, very few good moves his entire tenure. Hudler was one of the only good moves he ever made. Credit for Gaudreau really needs to go to Tod Button and the scouts. I mean he did let them do their job without the biases Sutter had imposed on them but does he really get a lot of credit for empowering his scouts? Shouldn't that kind of be a given as a GM? The best thing Feaster did was let the scouts do their job? How bad does that make him?

As bad as some of Sutter's deals were he did also have some real gold. Button also made some good moves after his initial disastrous 1st year. Whereas Feaster was just godawful overall. That man gets way too much credit on this board. He squandered some of the best assets we had into a couple 1sts, 2nds and busts. Good riddance to that man, he was an embarrassment. His trades were an embarrassment. His press conferences were an embarrassment (intellectual honesty, fool me once, fool me twice) right before he got fooled yet again. Feaster is clearly the worst GM we had in my time of following the team the past 20 years.

The difference in capability from Feaster to Treliving is enormous. We went from a mostly incompetent GM who was actually quoted as saying he didn't try to win trades to probably the most savvy GM we've had in my 20 years of following the team. It's a good time to be a Flames fan. Thankfully the owners found and trusted a hockey man in Burke to do an organizational review. And thank Burke that he found Treliving. We're in great hands now, not worried one bit about the direction of the team.