Quote:
Originally Posted by ComixZone
I agree that they were supposed to suck in 13/14. Jay Feaster traded off Iggy and Bouw, and then did like nothing that Summer. He planned on his team sucking in 13/14.
Brian Burke fired him in the fall of 2013 I do believe.
Brad Treliving was hired in April of 2014, and the team immediately went back to spending free agent dollars.
So yeah, Feaster wanted the team to be bad in 13/14, and the Flames fired him and abandoned that train of thought as soon as possible.
…certainly not saying Feaster was a good GM. Those Iggy/Bouw deals sucked - but at least he was “intellectually honest” about where the team was and seemed to want to tank it up. Had the Flames been more aggressive at that 2014 TDL, we easily could have ended up with Draisaitl or someone better than Benny too. The difference was something like 10 points.
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Unfortunately I don't know how likely it is that we could have had Draisaitl instead of Bennett - a lot of scouts had Bennett tagged as the top forward from that draft and many, many posters (myself included) were pretty thrilled that Edmonton passed on Bennett and picked Draisaitl instead.
2014 would have been a good year to load up on additional 1st round picks though - even though I recall it was considered a "weaker" draft at the top end compared to some years, the depth of top six forwards from that draft seems very solid - Pastrnak, Larkin, Ehlers, Nylander, Fiala, Larkin, Reinhart, Tuch, Schmaltz, McCann, Kempe were all first-rounders (though some of those guys only emerged as top players recently). Getting one or two of those guys would have been pretty great. Easy to say in hindsight though, it could have easily ended up like the previous year where we got Klimchuk and Poirier with our extra 1st rounders.