Quote:
Originally Posted by Spurs
I am saying that at the time of the trade you could see that the Flames were not good enough to compete and that the Hubredeau/Weegar additions were not going to change that.
It was a team that needed a rebuild and having a piece like Tkachuk would have been the perfect piece to start that process.
But to answer your question in general I think that in many cases it is easy to predict teams success year to year and with some it is not easy. Not a blanket answer for every single team, every single year.
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It was easy to see the Flames needed a rebuild? Well, That was and is a pretty easy thing to say both say then and now. Rebuilding is a common and fashionable want for fans of most teams. ‘This isn’t working, so start over’.
It’s important to remember the Flames just came off their second (?) best regular season ever and lost, disappointingly, in the second round. They had an experienced HC who won the Jack Adam’s and their goalie finished second in Vezina voting. There was good reason to believe they could have stayed competitive. It was not clear or easy that they needed a rebuild and I strongly doubt that ownership would have purposefully gone in that direction.
The conversation among hockey journalists headed into the season was ‘are the Flames better this year than they were last?’ The Athletic had them going to the cup finals. Not many reputable journalists/reporters who cover hockey for a living made the prediction that the Flames season would unfold the way it did. On a related note, I’ll challenge you to find one journalist/reprter/blogger/hockey executive or scout who said Huberdeau would have the single largest drop in points one year to the next.
Saying a team should rebuild is easy. You could easily make that argument for most teams in the league, and I’d bet there are no shortage of fans saying the same things about their teams as we often see stated here. It’s a lazy and mostly uniformed take in most instances.
In any event it’s largely moot because the Flames are rebuilding. So the discussion is probably now shifting from should the Flames rebuild to how should the Flames rebuild, which is yet another futile argument posed by those who don’t really have any skin in the game.