What? Two of the players you listed are goalies.
As Dack mentioned, I meant higher end goalie options. I liked Elliott, but we needed an up and comer to platoon with him IMO. If we had poured more picks into prying someone higher end, things are totally different.
But as Anglesmith mentioned, things are 20/20. We didn't want to use the picks for flexibility, then suddenly, even with picks, there's no options, which IMO it's why we ended up with Hamonic and Smith. I think Elliott was a clever pick up. I would not have minded Elliott to platoon with Smith which IMO would have been better than Smith + Lack, but I think there was an influence of sorts that kept Elliott from returning. Smith/Elliott probably is stable enough to take us to ploffs vs the games we bled with Lack, Gilles and Rittich in net. But then we're still sand bagging the kids and no long term options.
Weirdly enough, even with the expansion draft, it seems that many goalies rumored to be available were actually not available, all the currency in the world and no available pieces to acquire. We were literally staring at Smith who by many accounts were all plan C or so. Pieces like Grubauer, Fleury etc. actually ended up as currency or bluffs in the expansion draft. Darling, Pickard etc. seemed like pieces that were out of reach the entire time due to (my guess) internal mandate to move certain goalies out of conference. Bishop fell through due to rumored ownership/King veto. Arizona paid a high price for Raanta. Higher than we'd likely have been comfortable paying.
My theory literally is that we had Hamonic lined up for a while but Treliving wanted to use the picks for a goalie. However, no goalie panned out so Treliving attempted to do Smith + Hamonic as an aggregate improvement instead of the higher end goalies he was hoping to target. I think it's plausible Treliving made that Hamonic trade with an exit clause in mind for a dman with value... but that's just me thinking weird things. Dougie to 1st line RW is such a plan, trading Dougie/Brodie may have been another.
OT:
Exasperated ideas wise, what happens if we subtract Dougie from the D core and put him on 1st RW as a forward rover? We know he had relatively good chemistry with JG in the same vein as Wideman...
JG - Mony - Hamilton
3M
Bennett - Janko - Brouwer
Ferland - Shore - Lazar
Stajan/Hathaway?
Gio - Hamonic
Stone - Brodie
Kulak - Andersson
TSpoon?
Smith
Rittich
Can't be worse than much of the knee jerk reactions I've seen so far...
And if I'm targeting a buy low candidate goalie, I might consider seeing if Carolina is looking to trade again, and see if we can nab Darling as a project a la Kanzig. Darling ain't amazing, but with mentor ship from Smith, he should be theoretically better than the Lack/Gilles/Rittich combo. I'd assume Treliving would probably involve one of Rittich or Gilles in such a trade. I am hugely assuming that he's capable of playing at least a decent 1B/backup option. Carolina may even retain again like they did on Lack if we involve some low picks or some excess tweener prospects with one of Gilles or Rittich.
I just realized that there's been a few roster crossovers between the two clubs in recent years. Nakladal, Jooris, Kanzig... Maybe we could make the deals a little bigger? Any idea if Carolina is open to moving Darling, and what we'd have to add to Darling to get Carolina to salary retain?