Quote:
Originally Posted by Classic_Sniper
The drafting has been fine and I'm a big fan of Tod Button and have confidence in his abilities. It's Treliving's signings and acquisitions that have been problematic to me. His acquisitions of high character/leadership players have not worked out. Burke made a lot of acquisitions for truculence purposes that made no sense and Sutter's entire era was littered with moves for players who were good Western boys or players who generally were high character people.
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I disagree with this a little. When he came on we had to deal with very large and physical teams in our division: L.A., Anaheim, and even San Jose. It was clear that we needed to have that element on the team in the early part of the rebuild just to make sure our young guys weren't getting run over. It worked too. The team played with more confidence than their talents allowed, resulting in some early success.
Even as we have moved into a phase of real playoff contention, there is little doubt that we were pushed around physically in that 2nd-most recent Anaheim playoff series. Having a few more players who have physicality, but are also good players, would have made that a much more even series. It wasn't much better in that 4 game sweep either. We played with more jam, but overall Anaheim had that in spades and we struggled to match it.
You do need a little bit of size and physicality in the modern NHL, but you definitely have to be able to skate and chip in some offense. That's why getting a guy like Bollig didn't make much sense.