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Originally Posted by TOfan
Highly suspect.
I’ll argue that Markstrom and Tanev are not peripheral parts, far from it. Moving forward, the acquisition of those two players could prove to be very good moves, I believe there’s very good reason to believe that will be the case.
Overall, was last offseason a failed strategy? Hard to argue it wasn’t based on this past season. I’m reasonably sure signing Lievo, Nordstrom,Simon, Ritchie wasn’t Treliving’s first choice, but not everything is going to fall into place exactly how one might want it to. We can only speculate, but what would a Gaudreau-Monahan-Andersson line looked like? Better that Gaudreau-Monahan-Ritchie/Simon/Lievo, I bet.
Problem is, a GM might have a plan, but so do 30 other GM’s. you have to find a match. there are negotiations on top of negotiations, throughout the league. I really think people underestimate how challenging it must be to make these types of player acquisitions.
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Maybe I should’ve prefaced my point by saying that I was talking about forwards. The entire conversation leading up to my point was all about the Flames’ 4 lines, so when I say periphery pieces, I’m strictly talking about the 4 UFA forwards that were selected.
Trust me, I wouldn’t call one of the season’s MVPs in Chris Tanev a periphery piece. I was one of the few people who really liked the signing and maybe the only one who said the Flames would be protecting him in the expansion draft. I’m a big fan of Chris Tanev and without a doubt, this is probably Treliving’s greatest UFA pick up.
With all that said though, defense wasn’t the main issue this season, it was goal scoring. The coach and management have all singled that out as the biggest problem and I agree. In fact, I hated their line combos from day 1. Darryl used the word “entitlement” when talking about the young players this season and he’s 100% right IMO. Management thought Dillon Dube was ready for 1st line duty this season, that was a failure of a decision right from the get go as that line struggled and so too did the other lines as none of the forwards could gain any traction all season long.
That is 100% on management for experimenting with 4 brand new lines. They didn’t know their team well enough to put together 4 cohesive lines. You say that Leivo, Ritchie, Simon and Nordstrom wasn’t Treliving’s first choice and I agree. But years of poor player acquisitions and buyouts will do that to you. Had it not been for the Neal and Brouwer singings, this team would’ve had the cap space to find proper depth on the right wing. This is unequivocally, management’s fault. They dug themselves into a tremendous hole and now they’re finding out just how hard it is to dig themselves out.