Chris Stewart, Derek Grant, and Nate Thompson are so, so, so negligible that anyone still actually complaining about them has to be intentionally ignoring the actual problems with this roster in order to pin blame on minor Fletcher acquisitions
There are no negligible moves. Everything matters, down to the 7th defenseman on the Phantoms and beyond. No GM is going to bat a thousand, but Fletch is building some kind of Voltron of shit and it's a massive problem. It's like poking a hole in your ship. Yeah, one small hole isn't going to matter very much,
but no captain should be poking f***ing holes in his ship!, and by the time he pokes his 1oth or 100th hole, you're sunk.
What are Fletch's GOOD moves? Pitlick was just fine but was always going to be a yearlong acquisition. Niskanen played fairly well for a year albeit with one horrendous playoff game, retired, and in the meantime we sunk a sizable amount of our cap space into acquiring him. Aside from those two moves, what else has Fletch done that's positive? Hayes' contract has been a problem since the day it was signed. Ditto Laughton's. Braun was just treading water relatively expensively at best. Ditto Gus. Elliott's corpse was a problem. Stewie, Grant, Thompson are shit. Losing Friedman needlessly so that we could give Nate f***ING Prosser playing time is a joke. Andreoff?
I keep looking for silver-linings, some glimmers of hope that Chuck actually has a sensible plan and is capable of executing it, but all I see is a mountain of shit.