Quote:
Originally Posted by Strange Brew
Saying he left due to "money, Covid and fun" didn't sound like praise to me, felt like a thinly veiled criticism of his priorities.
Definitely some projecting on my part, but just feels like some posters, yourself among them, devote a ton of energy to bringing negativity to his tenure with the Flames and bring the same amounts of energy to defending the organization's treatment and handling of him.
Any comment suggesting that the organization should have learned something from the Bennett and Tkachuk situations is met with justification of the team's actions and implied criticism of the players.
Maybe you're 100% right and the organization did the best they could. Kind of feels to me like there are some lessons to be learned, namely:
Invest in your young players, especially those with the highest ceilings.
Lock up your stars as soon as you can for as long as you can.
You can see Conroy trying to do both. He just doesn't have any stars right now, so hopefully he is locking up the right players.
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That is a complete micharacterization of what I'm saying. I didn't claim to praise him or criticize him, I just said what the evidence said about his reasons. He has talked about all of those things except taxes and his choices of teams talks about that. In fact, he ended up on the team with the teast amount of prior success. They'd been ousted in the first and second rounds the previous two years and missed the POs for 4 before that.
And I never said the organization did "the best they could", nor have I denied that they could have and should have learned something.
All I have said is that (a) Tkachuk wanted to leave for reasons aside from winning a cup and it sure wasn't because he felt the team had no hope of success and (b) Bennett played better when he got to Florida and maybe some of the problem (not all or even most) was on him.
Your problem is that it's all got to be 100% one way or the other. You can't see any scenario where both player and organization bear responsibility in Bennett's case, or any scenario in which Tkachuk wasn't set on leaving either at the end of his RFA or pretty soon thereafter.