Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolven
I do not get the idea of blaming the ownership group for any of this. There was no path toward a rebuild with how Treliving left things. He had built a contender that was in the middle of a pivot from Gaudreau + Tkachuk to Huberdeau + Kadri. On paper that team was still a playoff team and would have been in the playoffs had Huberdeau only regressed to 70 points instead of 55.
But I do not see any kind of ownership meddling in the last 3 years. It really just looks like Treliving handed over a team to Conroy that lived and died based on the performance of Huberdeau. He was really bad the 2 years we wanted him to be good, which caused the retool to begin. Then he was relatively good the year we wanted to have him be bad and let the team bottom out.
I really just cannot think of a single move that looks like ownership is trying to tell Conroy to keep the team competitive. Sure, they could have traded Andersson a year ago, but that would have been pretty reckless to gut the D group to that extent, especially while bringing a rookie goalie online. I don't believe anyone could argue that keeping Backlund was ownership's way of staying competitive.... Or running the team $20M under the cap.
Even hiring Conroy as the GM or Huska as the head coach - neither of these moves say to me that being competitive quickly was the priority.
I do agree that the priority right now needs to be landing that #1C and I think the Andersson trade is the most likely path forward to making that happen considering we couldn't bottom out last season. Next season is another chance to bottom out but I wouldn't bet on it.
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I don't necessarily think that Conny has been given the mandate to be competitive every year through the past couple of seasons, but I do believe that ownership will not support a long rebuild- thus, we have a "retool" in progress. Edwards wants his playoff revenue, and probably doesn't want too many years with no post-season, IMO.