You're totally right.
That NYR GM who built a team that is currently placed 6th in the league, who found a gem in Grabner and basically stole your boy Puempel after killing us in the Zibby trade is awful. He should have signed a Brendan Smith type player in the summer and just left his team status quo at this point. That's what a smart GM would have done.
Well first off, Smith was not available to sign in the summer.
Second, I don't approve of that trade from a Rangers perspective.
Third, the Rangers can get away with trading picks and prospects because they are able to sign guys like Hayes, Vesey and Gilmour for free.
And fourth, the Rangers are a much better team than us and have a much better chance of winning the cup than we do, which means mortgaging their future for short-term fixes makes more sense in their case.
http://www.ottawasun.com/2017/02/15...-open-wallet-for-sens-trades----within-reason
The news that Dorion got the go ahead to spend came out two weeks ago not at the start of the season. It was presumably related to the deadline. So your point makes no sense if it hinges on us being allowed to spend in the summer.
Stalberg cost Carolina 1.5M.
If we were to sign him it would probably cost around the same. Don't see a legitimate argument why Carolina is a much nicer place to sign than Ottawa.
That 1.5M is reduced when you consider that it would have pushed a guy like Lazar from the NHL to the AHL, and therefore from an NHL salary of 900k to an AHL salary of 70k. This means that the real cost of adding a guy like Stalberg would be 600k.
If the argument is that increasing our salary expenditure by 0.86% was unfeasible, you may want to re-think your argument.
Stalberg could have been available and within budget. But we chose to go with guys like Kelly and Pyatt (outside signings), Lazar and Puemps (internal players) instead. One out of 4 of these guys proved to be effective. So now management is like "oh ****, we need to bring Stalberg and Burrows in, 3 of our guys turned out to be dog turds. Hey Euge, it looks like we're going to make the playoffs, is it cool if we spend some more money on player salary for the last 1/4 of the season?"
And Euge is like "ya sure, I'll make millions from the playoff gate, let's do it."
But in order to do that at this time of year, you gotta give up assets.
COULD Stalberg have fit money-wise? Sure. But they chose to go with different players, and those players didn't work. There is a finite amount of roster spots, we can't just sign a bunch of dudes in hopes that 3 of 6 work out.
You're chastising them for trying to rectify a problem on the team because they see a good opportunity to make a bit of noise in the playoffs. I just don't get it.
Unlike you, I'm not going to give Dorion and our pro-scouts credit for assuming that guys like Kelly, Neil and Lazar were capable NHLers, thus making the signing of an NHL forward unnecessary. They misidentified those players as capable NHL forwards and now the franchise has paid the price of Dahlen and a 3rd.
If we had a smart GM who hedged his bets and didn't pencil players into spots without backup plans, we wouldn't have thrown away a 3rd round pick today. Heck maybe we don't even give away Dahlen yesterday if Dorion didn't sleep through free agency.
