People complaining about the Brouwer and Neal signings might want to go back and look at the UFA markets at the time. When you need a top-six forward, and you don’t have anything coming up in the system to step into that role right away, you either have to trade away draft capital, or go to the UFA market. And the UFA market means overpaying for aging players.
Here are the major UFA deals in the summer of 2016:
https://www.dailyfaceoff.com/news/20...-agent-tracker
Stamkos aside (he never went to market), the only one that looks good in hindsight is Perron. Every other deal - Lucic, Okposo, Eriksson, Ladd, Backes - looks as bad or worse than Brouwer.
Here are the deals from 2018:
https://www.dailyfaceoff.com/news/20...-agent-tracker
Again, other than the players like Carlson who didn’t go to market, I don’t see any great signings there.
So if people want to say NHL GMs should steer clear of UFAs and rely on drafting and developing, that’s a valid criticism. But there’s no alternate timeline where someone else in Treliving’s shoes in 2016 and 2018 does markedly better in the UFA market. The UFA market is what it is - a place to pick up proven NHLers without giving up anything except for bad contracts.