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Originally Posted by Erick Estrada
Yeah but those teams have won cups or on the cusp of winning a cup. Treliving made those moves for an unfinished team that was on a rotation of making the playoffs/missing the playoffs the next season. The Flames needed difference makers to get to where the teams you listed were and he traded a lot of assets for depth players that never moved the needle. He's doing the same thing today in Toronto as the guys he traded top prospects and 1st round picks accomplished nothing for the Leafs in the playoffs. He's not a good GM.
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He thought he had a contending core in Gaudreau, Tkachuk, Monahan, Lindholm, Backlund, Giordano, Hanifin, Brody, Smith. Maybe he overvalued his roster and rushed their contention window.
In Toronto he absolutely has a contending core. You don’t wait until after you’ve won a Cup to push your chips in (though Cup-winning teams like TBL and COL do keep pushing their chips in to keep their contending window open).
And if you look at the picks traded away by contending teams, most of them were for depth guys and rentals. Opposing GMs typically don’t deal away young difference makers with term in exchange for 25th to 32nd overall picks. There are exceptions, like Seth Jones.
Are Joe Sakic and Chris MacFarland bad at their jobs because the Avs dealt away 1st round picks and top prospects for rentals Sean Walker and Brock Nelson, only to get bounced in the first round both times? Is Bill Zito a bad GM because he traded away a 1st and a top prospect in Owen Tippet for a few weeks of Claude Giroux, only to lose in the 2nd round?
There’s a big element of gambling in running an NHL team, and most moves are made to nudge the odds of winning a Cup 1 or 2 per cent higher. And most of them fail, because only one team wins the Cup.