Quote:
Originally Posted by ComixZone
I crave the Colorado, Tampa Bay, Florida route.
Which is the same as the Buffalo and Edmonton routes, just with less incompetence.
When you look at Tampa and Florida - they didn't really do anything unachievable in Calgary. Florida managed to woo Bobrovsky - that's the biggest thing that Calgary likely couldn't do (and it shouldn't be downplayed, he was huge in their success).
What Tampa and Florida did so well was draft their foundational players, do well throughout the rest of the draft, and made aggressive GOOD trades. Paying a premium for a salary retained Blake Coleman as an example for Tampa, and acquiring Reinhart and Bennett in Florida's build. On the flip side of this, Edmonton has done a bunch of dumbass stuff like pay bad free agents (Campbell), make brutally bad trades (Athanasiou), and manage their internal cap structure very poorly (hello Nurse). Buffalo and Edmonton both share a strong lack of ability on the draft floor as well (prior to Kevyn Adams at least, verdict is out on him so far). They can't draft worth a damn outside of picking in the top-5, and this isn't a problem the Flames have. The biggest problem with the Flames is lack of opportunity to draft in the top-5.
I'm confident in Conroy and the Flames scouting staff IF they have the opportunity to make those top 5 picks. If they get the opportunity to draft twice in the Top-5, especially in the next few years, I believe Conroy can build a Championship team because the Flames do a lot of the other stuff well already. They just need the opportunity.
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Tampa and Florida are 2 of the top destinations in the league due to amazing weather, reasonable travel and no state tax. Calgary is a small market cold Canadian city. End of the day if Calgary takes the lose now to win later approach publicly the culture will be ruined and incredibly hard to rebuild. Buffalo made reasonable trades for RoR, Kane, and that did nothing. Look at Ottawa right now. They committed to tanking and rebuilding and cannot turn the corner despite having some foundational pieces in their early-mid 20’s that they drafted in this rebuild.
Ottawa, Columbus, Buffalo are far more similar to Calgary than Tampa or Florida.