Quote:
Originally Posted by UKflames
So this season will now finish with no trades at the deadline, team goes on a hot streak, now that marky's wife has given birth, but we still miss the playoffs by a point or two, giving us a worse draft pick.
Sounds about right for the flames.
|
I’m definitely in the minority but I’m mostly okay with this. I still think this is a competitive group that had a bad year. I think back to teams like Colorado and Tampa missing the playoffs when they were expected to be much better.
That said, I thought BT came up short last summer and that we ended up short a top 6 forward and in the end an offensive D man also (hello Kilington, are you there?).
I think the biggest miss isn’t buying or selling short term but failing to take advantage of a period of massive player movement to improve the team over the medium term.
Whether I or anyone else agrees or disagrees, it doesn’t seem that we cheer for an organization that chooses to tear it all down and rebuild. The Tkachuk trade was the time to start that if we wanted to. The goal of the franchise is to have a competitive but not necessarily super star team year in and year out.
If that’s the goal/plan, the team missed the mark by not moving more future chips in for players under contract. For example, we could have gone all in with AZ for Chychrun. The defense isn’t where it should or was expected to be without Kilington. If he had been here and we traded a D to improve the forward ranks, the D would be what it is now but maybe .5 GpG more from improvement to the forward corps.
Hard to know what other answers can come from within. Can Coronato fill some of the hole? Will Kilington be back and if so can he come back and play at the level he was?
Whatever the case, there are very few periods with player movement like this. We need to improve the top 6 somehow and in a way that gets better results from our $10MM man. We also need a D man that either drives more offense or frees someone like Weegar up more from defensive side of the puck to do more offensively.
To me, I think it was a missed opportunity not taking advantage of teams willingness to make big moves to find 1 or 2 players with great contracts for 2-4 years and to consider moves to shake things up to find more chemistry.