Quote:
Originally Posted by GioforPM
In a different discussion someone mentioned Kane and Toews and I fought up the fact that when 21 year old Kane and 22 year old Toews won the cup, they had a ton of good mid 20s guys to support them - Keith, Seabrook, Sharp, Ladd, Versteeg, Brouwer, Byfuglien (plus some vets like Hossa and Campbell).
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Yeah - there's no "right pathway" to build a team. Every team typically has the same pieces - a franchise centre, a capable goalie, an anchor defenseman, depth through the line up, good supporting pieces, game breaking winners, two-way top-9 forwards etc - but how you acquire those pieces is variable.
Beyond noting that you have to draft the most important pieces and they're most likely to be found at the top of the draft, there isn't much more that unites championship teams.
The best way forward isn't to to follow some pre-determined path, but to play the cards you're given. And I'm comfortable with the way Conroy is playing those cards. He's acquired a lot of interesting pieces through the past couple of drafts. And he's positioning the team to have at least one disastrous season over the next few years, which should allow them to acquire the franchise centre and/or game breaking winger they need.
Anyone who looks at this roster and thinks it's good needs to think it through again. This is a bad team on paper, it's going to get worse, and they over achieved last year. If this team unachieved their quality by even half as much as they overachieved last year, they're a lottery team.