Quote:
Originally Posted by bubbsy
Darryl sutter started from worse and got the flames to the cup finals, and 5 straight years of playoffs.
Both were flawed, but let's cool the breaks on appointing treliving anything above mediocre.
He will just be another gm that came and will go, without rendering any noteworthy legacy of the franchise.
Canadian team GMs absolutely have a major issue with the lack of patience. Probably the reason they haven't won a cup in decades, and why no te even looks close to contending for one.
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So much has changed in the NHL since the Sutter days they are hard to compare. That said, I actually think BT has proven he was a very good rebuild GM. I think he started with one of the worse situations in the league and managed to get from nothing to our “window” in 5 years (with two bonus playoff appearances and one round win as well). I think he accelerated that process with some pretty gutsy and slick trades, being the two Hamilton trades.
What we need to hold our horses on is now evaluating how he does GMing a team to go from good to contender. Very different GM skill set. And to me BT has yet to prove his skills for this stage of GMing, although I also feel most on here are simply expecting results too quickly and we need to give him more than 1 and a half seasons (of which one we had the second best regular season in franchise history and the other the team still occupies a playoff spot) before we call him a failure.
Also to the Canadian point, I also think it would be unfair not to recognize that the job of a Canadian team GM, specifically a Western Canadian small market GM is much harder in the good to great stage of team development. Intense media focus, bad weather, lots of travel and high taxes makes the teams unpopular for free agents (which means missing out or overpayment) and lots of good players with your teams on their NTC list. Once the building from within is done, much harder to improve the roster and make those last key moves on a western Canadian team for a variety of reasons.