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Originally Posted by Jiri Hrdina
^What makes Calgary unique is that over the long-term they have been pretty awful at managing the asset base via
- Trading players for next to nothing or past the point you can extract value from them
- Letting future core players walk or giving them away
- Poor drafting over sustained periods of time (Chucko, Irving, Pelech, etc).
You can look at each case in isolation and understand why, but ultimately you have to win more than you lose with each of these decisions. And I think under the current regime they are doing that. But for a very long-term that wasn't the case.
Lose trades
Allow good players to walk
Draft poorly
That creates an asset poor organization that becomes a hard hole to dig out of.
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Right, but we both agree that the Flames have been much improved in all three of those aspects of asset management more recently. For my money, getting consistently good returns in trades and at the draft are far and away much more important than how the team handles pending UFAs. If we are to rank the importance of these, it looks more like this:
1. Drafting
2. Trades
3. UFA asset recapture
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They have started to dig out now - but losing an asset like Johnny for little will just be a repeat of it.
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I think this is an overstatement—so long as the Flames continue to draft well and get good value in trades, then while walking Gaudreau to UFA for nothing would not be ideal, it would also not be such a detrimental blow on its own to irreparably set them back.
All that said, I expect that Gaudreau will be traded in the next two years unless there is an extension in the works that makes sense for both parties. Unlike Flash Walken, I do not expect a Gaudreau trade to trigger a rebuild:
· the forward group will still comprise Monahan, Tkachuk, Lindholm, and whomever fills the #1/2 LW hole all under the age of 27
· the blue line will feature three defensemen in the top-four all under 25
· This is to say nothing for the emergence of new players already in the system, or received in return for future asset recapture
Such is not the time nor circumstances under which to tear everything down and start over.