Quote:
Originally Posted by Textcritic
I get the frustration that fans have with Treliving, but I have long maintained that it is shortsighted. Without getting into it, I think that five years is an impossibly short window in which to build a team—it only works if everything goes exactly right. I think Treliving's situation is then complicated by the fact that this he was a first-time GM when he was hired in Calgary. Like in any job, it takes time to learn, and I think at the time that most people were happy to see Treliving forge his craft with a rebuilding team. Unfortunately, the unexpectedly good on-ice results in his first year on the job altered the mandate from his employers, and it probably convinced him to push forward prematurely.
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Agree with your post, and I've always felt that the bolded is the root of the failure. A failure to manage up by Burke/BT.
It seems to be Burke's MO that he's tried to replicate since orchestrating the crapshoot cup win in Anaheim. I don't mean to diminish the accomplishment...a cup is a cup, but those first few coming out of the lockout were a bit of a crapshoot as the league reset itself.
He signed Niedermayer, Selanne, and Carlyle coming out of the lockout and they ran to conf. finals that year. Then he traded for Pronger to put them over the top the next year. Getzlaf, Perry, Giguere/Bryz were already there, along with general institutional memory from a cup run 2 years pre-lockout. Lots of other great moves, and Burke deserves lots of credit, but I'd argue it was an exception to the general rule of how to build a cup contender, and the hardest to find pieces were already in place for him (#1C, #1G).
In both TOR and CGY, it seems he went straight to pushing them over the top, even though they weren't anywhere near ready, and it wasn't as easy to acquire Niedermayers, Selannes, or Prongers...