Nothing against your opinion, but I just want to address these two points.
To be fair you have to have a very high IQ to be the GM of a mediocre NHL team. There's a lot of intricacies that the common plebs don't understand like how signing Troy Brower to a big contract improves your team.
Guys like Peter Chiarelli and Paul Fenton definitely got their jobs through merit and were really just underappreciated geniuses. It's a ridiculous notion that all of the NHL GMs are actually super smart and savvy businessmen and everyone here is an idiot in comparison.
CEOs, CFO, CIO, COO etc. of many companies world wide have guys there that make major mistakes too. But they aren't as stupid as the average person thinks they are when they go and evaluate a handful of decisions out of thousands.
Genius? No. But many fans kinda play this, "Oh that guy sucks, I could do that at the NHL level..." thing, when a guy like John Scott would wreck you in a beer league game while also simultaneously getting wrecked by a guy like McDavid.
Even guys like Chia and Fenton have a few successes here and there. Chia has a cup and Fenton's criticized Fiala trade is now lopsided in the Wild's favour.
A bunch of fans think that they can be a GM because they do well in fantasy and I'm arguing that playing fantasy hockey is only a small portion of what the GM actually does (it is however one of the most scrutinized portions of their job).
Full marks to good GMs. Sakic (and the Avalanche) are one of the organizations that's the most invested in analytics and it's paying dividends. Yzerman has also turned into a fantastic GM. I just hate the idea that all GMs are super smart and great at their job and we can't critique decisions because they're GMs and we're not. I don't even think Treliving is bad... hes average IMO but for God's sake Mike Milbury was a GM for years. Simply having the job doesn't mean you're actually qualified or any good at it.
Fair. But as many are actually arguing, even the worst GM is likely going to do a far better job than the average fan. This because the average fan doesn't even know the extent of work a GM does for an organization and literally thinks a GM watches games for fun and plays fantasy league. IMO that's not even remotely close to half of the responsibilities of what a GM does (Good or bad).
There's two independent ideas going on here.
1. Criticizing a GM is fine.
2. Thinking you can do better than a GM. (Doing nothing is better mentality).
Criticize a GM all you want, but if a random fans thinks they can be a superior GM, that's where many other fans think that those fans are either stupid full of unearned confidence or hyperbolic and require a little bit of a reminder of their actual real life qualifications.