That's valid but there's a caveat to addressing those issues beyond this season, which needs to be taken into account. What was available out there this summer? And what was available out there on a one year deal?
Last summer was challenging because the team was tying up their two franchise forwards and ultimately locking up a significant portion of their available cap in 2018/19. Any long-term deals signed this summer were going to have significant ramifications on our future ability to add salary. That's including the Russell deal, which the same people seem to have a significant issue with. Sounds like it's damned if you do, damned if you don't now, doesn't it?
This season was sink or swim with much of the group who had success last season. We could've spent futures, made salary commitments, signed ridiculous FAs to try and squeak in. You can fault the GM there. But ultimately, would that have even been worth it? There were a lot of things that went wrong this season. I'm not convinced a couple FA signings would've prevented them from occurring.
That's the GMs job, to find those players and what he did was create all this cap space to no purpose. I, as a fan, don't know who was available and who would be the right fit, that's what he's paid to do. They needed to build on last season and this season should have been used as a springboard to bigger success and instead, he treated it as somewhat of a rebuild depending too heavily on internal growth.
I didn't mind the Eberle deal, I didn't mind the Pouliot buyout but he did absolutely nothing with that extra available cap space. They threw Puljujarvi in the top 6 attempting to replace Eberle, they assumed that Letestu would sustain an unsustainable PP pace, they assumed that Benning was ready to assume a bigger role, they assumed that Cagguila was ready to take the next step and they assumed that Talbot could have played virtually every game once again at a very high level. Too many assumptions, that's depending on too many things to go perfectly right. In fairness to Chia, it was impossible to predict this much regression from mostly everybody at once but he should have done something this offseason to mitigate that potential regression and quite frankly, he did nothing and still has all this available cap space that will all be for nothing as the cap crunch looms starting next season.
When you miss the playoffs 2 out of 3 years with the best player in the league, management and coaching should be at the forefront of blame for that. It's inexcusable. Now, the Oilers have limited resources to add to the roster without subtracting from it to bring in that addition. Next season will heavily depend on a lot of players bouncing back.
Taylor Hall never would've let this happen.
