Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the next part is easy, just that it’s easier to add pieces to what the Canucks look to have in Pettersson and Horvat as top centres than it is to get a franchise player in the first place.
Second, I completely agree on what’s happened in five years. Management has squandered a fair amount of good fortune by simultaneously committing to lighting large bags of money on fire for the next several years.
The blue line is bad. Good news! It’s also a lot less bad now. For example, it may not surprise you to know that Hutton-Gudbranson was a bad pairing. How bad may surprise:the difference in five on five goal differential between that pair and Edler-Tanev was larger than the on ice goal differential for all defensemen in the league not named Morgan Rielly (on a per minute basis, they were even worse). You could make a reasonable case that swapping Tanev for, say, Giordano would not have made as big a difference as simply scratching Gudbranson and going Hutton-Stecher and Pouliot-Biega.
Try to make some smart bets on players in tough spots (I really like Pilut in Buffalo who for some reason has fallen out of favour quickly), clear as much salary as possible by trading guys with term (like Beagle) for guys on horrid expiring deals (like Sobotka) or that are buyout candidates, and above all else, keep your powder dry in free agency. If you can’t sign Panarin or Karlsson, unplug the phone for the first week in July. Use your winger issues as a pitch for top Euro players looking to bet on themselves. And so on.
To my mind, all of this is easier than “draft Elias Pettersson”
