Quote:
Originally Posted by Vinny01
I agree with this which is why I believe the regression of the top players is the reason this rebuild has ended up as a failure.
Monahan and Gaudreau teased us 2 years ago when they put up 82 and 99pts along with Lindholm and Tkachuk producing 74 and 77pts. Those 4 were supposed to stack up against the likes of McDavid-Draisaitl-Nuge, Matthews-Marner-Tavares-Nylander, Schiefele-Connor-Wheeler-Dubois, and Pettersson, Boeser, Horvat, and Miller.
They are easily the worst group of forwards among those teams and are right there with Gallagher-Anderson-Toffoli-Suzuki for being straight up mediocre. Montreal and Calgary are similar where they simply lack the high end talent. It looked like that wasn’t going to be a problem for the Flames with their big 4 forwards being supported by guys like Backlund, Dube, Mangiapane but when the top end talent doesn’t live up to potential the team doesn’t look deep at all.
This rebuild failed because the top players failed to hit their ceilings for more than 60 or so games in 2018/19. Just like the 2015 season that 2019 season was an outlier that gave the organization and fans hope that this team would and could be a legit contender. Analytics made 2019 look like less of a fluke but it was still many players having a career season. Maybe they should send the team to China again before next season starts or something to help them get their mojo back?
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I've said all year, and after last year, that I don't think they're good enough, no matter who the coach is. I understand the hope that, with depth stepping up, they could compete. But that hope was pretty much merely because that's what we had to work with.
If you work through the events from say 2013 to now, it's hard to see any other result though. No elite 1C was available. So I'm not heaping a lot of blame on Treliving. Or even the players for being who they are. I think they don't max their effort a lot, but even if they do, it's just not enough.