[shutout]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

I have a hard time seeing how anyone reading Duhatschek’s interview with Conroy posted today can still believe the franchise is interested in a rebuild.

Personally, I feel you want to be competitive, and you want your team to win. So, there is a balance between short- and long-term.

You want to be competitive. You want to have success. You want to get your young guys in, but you want to put them in an environment with some veteran guys that can show them how the NHL works.

There are different ways to do it. One way is to go right to the bottom and try to build it back up.

To be at the very bottom, that’s a lot of pain. And the one thing you don’t want to do, you never want to accept losing

I have an idea of what I would like to get for each guy; an idea of what the return should be. You’re looking for fair value.

I probably am a bit more impatient and would like to do things quicker. But I also want to make sure it’s the right deal. I wouldn’t do something just to do it. That doesn’t make any sense.

I still believe that you can’t let assets walk out the door. ... we have to make sure we have assets coming back. The problem is, what is the value in the end?

But money in, money out is such a big thing these days, with the cap being the way it’s been the last three years. ... then there’s how you might retain. You only have three slots.

Now, with everybody so tight against the cap, sure there are deals you’d like to make, but you can’t make it work unless you have to take back a certain player you don’t really want

You want to build a foundation moving forward and it’s hard. Some teams don’t have the draft picks because they’ve gone for it in previous years. Last year, at the draft, first-round picks were hard to come by. Everybody just knows how valuable picks can be.

I knew when we made the deal that people wouldn’t be overly excited. But if I was going to get younger and start building the team the way I wanted to, I couldn’t keep the same team completely coming back. So I understand that. It’s hard to find players. You want to keep adding to that stable of young players.

You can draft a million players, but if you’re not going to give them a chance, you’re not going to know what you have.

Now that they see where people are in the standings, it gives everybody a clearer picture of what they want to do. They give me the vision of their team and I give them my vision of ours.

https://theathletic.com/5180793/2024...-craig-conroy/