There's plenty of things he's done well.
His trades have also always been good. Especially ones where he was gathering draft picks for mostly trash players, Timonen, Coburn, Rinaldo, L.Schenn, Lecavalier, and Streit. This shows that he seems to understand the right way to build a modern day team (drafting) and he recognized how bad those guys were. Even if we don't give him credit for the actual drafting, he deserves credit for properly using the scouts by giving them lots of picks to work with and trusting their calls.
I’m definitely willing to give him the credit for the drafting. The scouts deserve credit too, but ultimately he has to listen to them.
The trades have been good, but until the Schenn deal, they’ve been the easiest type of deal to make. I have X asset that’s out the door. Solicit bids for picks. Choose the best one. This falls under a partial credit umbrella for me.
He's also done a good job at re-signing current players. I'm happy with the contracts he's given to guys like Gudas, Couturier, Ghost, Raffl, Schenn, and Voracek.
This is fair and should be added in his column as a big positive overall. The negatives far outweigh the positives. That’s all you can ask.
The Schenn contract is an interesting one, though. It was somewhere between fair and a touch high the day it was signed.
Not all of his outside additions have been bad. Signing Elliott was fine, MDZ was good to start, Neuvirth has been good when he's actually played, and Schultz was an OK placeholder/#7.
MDZ was indeed a good addition at relative cost — both the initial one year deal and the 2 year second one made total sense no matter how they turned out.
Schultz was a good acquisition initially, then he overestimated what the market would do and gave him the 2 year deal that turned out to be an overpayment immediately. A good acquisition that turned into and understandable mistake. Neuvirth was a bit of the same. He has the room to make those mistakes now. If he paid more because he knew cap was irrelevant in the short-term, fair enough. But we’re going to be pushing up against it in a few years and those deals have to go away.
Even the guys on the team we don't like were added for a good reason. Without the benefit of hindsight: Lehtera sucks but I'd still make that trade again, Weise made sense, and getting Filppula was a good move (especially when you consider that we didn't have Patrick at the time) and all we lost was a corpse.
His biggest failure is easily Hakstol, but he still has time to fix that so long as he doesn't start next year as coach.
I don’t even count Lehtera as an acquisition. He was the cost of doing business. I don’t hold Umberger against him for the same reason.
I don’t think we’re ever going to agree on Filppula because I have such a wildly different view of their opinion of him that it’s hard to find a reasonable talking point. If I did think the same, I would understand being fine with it.
The problem with Weise on July 1st was the contract. You don’t go 4 years at a premium on 4th line Wingers. What’s the benefit?
To be clear, the point I was making was what overall balances out to a positive. Of course there have been individual moves that were fantastic.
The biggest takeaway from your post for me was the lack of pointing to meaningful in-house development. No matter how good your drafting is, at some point you need to equip these kids with the mechanisms to keep improving.
Here’s a serious question for you (and anyone else): Do you think Hextall believes the path the org took to develop Couturier after Hextall returned was overall correct or incorrect? Also, does the “Filppula freed him up” narrative exist in his mind? Starting it then removes the issue of starting on the 4th line in his teens with supermassive black holes surrounding him.
