Again it's comments like this that I object to
"BT gets pretty close to a free pass for accelerating the rebuild and the hamonic fiasco"
People have specifically outlined those as negatives on his resume (along with bad UFAs) so it's not like people are giving him a free pass, they just see the positive outweighing the negatives.
And there is no doubt that the organization made a massive mistake in not starting to move out the former core (Iginla, Regehr, Kipper) until it was too late to extract value. I think that was likely an ownership mandate largely based on a desire to win a cup with #12.
But yeah it hurt us big time long-term.
But the lack of scouts and farm team to me are largely an excuse for bad drafting. I'm not one to adhere to any draft rankings but he would have done a lot better if he had taken the Kevin Lowe approach and drafted off the THN draft magazine. Guys like Pelech and Chucko were surprise selections where they were picked.
My belief is that Sutter put constraints around the scouting team in terms of the type of player he wanted in the first round - with too much emphasis on size and not nearly enough on skill.
The draft for me is all about upside and skill.
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