This just seems really oversimplified to me. Given what we had available in the expansion draft, where was this "great" team going to emerge from, a hill of magic beans? Outside of Vegas, instant success has never been open to expansion teams. And who was going to take enough of our middle ground, mediocre players off our hands and give us the high draft choices needed to build an elite prospect pool? You are talking about situations there were never realistically going to happen in the real world. Francis has played the hand he was dealt, and I can't fault him for not being able to do the impossible.
Again, my preference would have been tanking straight out of the gate. We got there eventually (we're 25th in the standings with no hope on the horizon short term) because Ron Francis doesn't know how to build a team, and Hakstol doesn't know how to coach a team, but this is the result of incompetence by them not a measured strategic approach.
I provided some examples of better moves Francis could have made during the expansion draft already, and there have been tons of analyses done on all the missed opportunities by Francis (just google it).
You raise a great point - who would take middle ground, mediocre players for draft picks? Nobody, so it's curious that Francis left a bunch of desirable trade bait assets on the table, ostensibly to "preserve cap flexibility" (why, for a team not desiring to win near-term? Nobody knows! And how did that cap flexibility play out for fielding a competitive team? Not good!)
Fistfullofbeer points out we need a good team to keep fans engaged to defend Francis's actions, which is odd when we're watching a terrible Kraken team night after night.
Francis must be fired ASAP. The Kraken will never go anywhere with him at the helm. He has no strategy at all and is simply making the most conservative possible moves across the board because that's who he is. He's not a good GM at all and never has been.
