Quote:
Originally Posted by RedHawk12
Competing teams trade picks. Rebuilding teams acquire picks. That's not rocket science either. We were in a stage under Tre where we were trying to compete, whether through ownership mandate or through Tre's own. Look at Tampa's pick situation (on capfriendly while you still can haha). Look at Boston, Vegas, Dallas, Toronto. Some of those teams won cups by trading picks. Most of them didn't. That's chance, but they all traded picks.
We traded a 1st for Toffoli at a time when we were clearly looking at making a run. It was a pretty decent trade that helped with one of the best runs we had in the Tkachuk/Gaudreau era. Going further back, we traded picks to get Hamilton. The Hamilton trade tree in it's entirety actually looks very good for us today. But you've lumped those trades under the notion that we were wasting picks.
Trading 1sts will always look good when you win a cup and will a lot of the times look bad when you don't, but you always have to pay the price of admission to have a chance.
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Let’s look at Tampa’s situation (because like the Flames some would say they were a competing team between 2015-22). They traded 8 picks in the first 3 rounds over that period of time. Tampa is a little different too because during that time they traded players for first rounders as well (got a first for JT Miller). Brad never did that, it was just a constant exodus of picks.
So to compare, two competitive teams between 15-22, the Tampa Bay Lightning who made 4 Cup Finals in that period of time, 6 Conference Finals in that period of time and the Calgary Flames under Brad Treliving who participated in the NHL.
Tampa - traded 8 picks out of the first three rounds to compete
Calgary - traded 12 picks out of the first three rounds to compete. I actually did the math wrong in my first post, it was half of the picks (50%) that Brad traded out not 44%.
My point is that Brad had a unique approach, one almost never taken in the NHL and likely to be never taken again where he took a burn the boats approach to future assets every year and traded out picks virtually every year. My comment is not about whether it looks good or not, just that the Flames did it every single year and did more of it than any team in NHL history over a 8 year period.