Quote:
Originally Posted by Jiri Hrdina
Riser for sure. The Gilmour/Leeman deal is just so bad where they lost on not just the two big names, but literally every name included. Macoun/Nattress were both key parts of the blueline here and continued to be in Toronto. It was franchise altering for both teams in opposite ways.
Sutter got the team to the finals so hard to ignore that. But as a GM he wasn't good. He drafted poorly but his narrow view of what a good player is/was caused him to toss aside quality players for next to nothing. Examples including Toni Lydman and Anton Stralman. He just was a VERY poor talent evaluator. And then he lost his mind down the stretch inexplicitly acquiring a guy like Kotalik. I don't think he knew what he was doing.
I admit I have a bias towards him though.
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I think his dual role often makes it seem like the GM was great. The coach Darryl Sutter was probably the best coach this team has had. The GM is probably the worst, he had 1 year under the old CBA and the playing field evened and he fumbled it big time.
What made that 04 team great was the team speed and the rules changed to allow for speed to be a big factor and he went the other way big time. Old and slow, couldn't give a F about teh draft. Even Conroy has mentioned that the team was really fast just recently. I remember the media talking about it after the finals as well if we added more skill to our speed we could take off.
If you build a team and give it to Darryl he can get a lot out of them. Just don't let him have any say in the players.