Just to collect my thoughts somewhere...
There are definitely positives.
Our core is still young. Our cap situation isn't too bad. Neals deal is terrible, but it's mitigated quite a bit by other contracts being generally just fine.
Kylington, Välimäki and Andersson all had very promising rookie seasons, and Hanifin showed flashes of really high potential. We probably need to trade one our young D-men, or Brodie, but any one of them should bring pretty good value back.
Frolik is likely going to get moved at some point, and there's likely to be a GM out there who really likes what he brings.
Rittich showed a lot of potential, and Smith made a big rebound, so it's not absolutely disastrous if they're still our goalies next season. (Rittich moving up to #1 hopefully.) While our goalie prospects didn't have great seasons, at least we have several coming up.
We seem to have become a fairly attractive destination for undrafted/college players.
The upside of the playoff collapse is that Treliving probably gets a fairly free reign to make the changes he sees as necessary. Nobody in Calgary is going to argue that changing things up is pointless. With a lot of players having career years, if Treliving decides to trade someone from the core, we should be selling high. Only Giordano has a full NTC, and most players don't even have a modified NTC, which gives Treliving a lot of options.
While there's no blue chip prospects, we still have most of our picks, and a few decent forwards prospects to allow for growth from within that way.
A lot of our guys are of the hardworking and smart type. I'm for example sure that Matthew Tkachuk is now thinking how he needs to develop his game to make a bigger impact next year.
What happened in the playoffs was only a statement on where the team is now, not what it's ceiling is.
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