100% of people predicted a decline, doesn't mean many GMs could have done or would have done something significantly different on the tail-end of our core guy's careers. Anyone can sit on a message board right now and say Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington etc are going to decline and will need to rebuild in 5-10 years. It doesn't make you a brilliant hockey mind.
The hindsight isn't about not being able to see we were heading for a rebuild, it's about pretending we knew the team wouldn't get past the 2nd round after 09. That's an attractive narrative for people who want to make it seem like Holland has been doing a bad job for a decade, but it's all based on hindsight.
You can believe me or you can't, but I knew we were pretty much done as a great team in game 3 or so of the 09 Finals. Even as we built up a 3-1 lead in that series, it just felt like it was a 'last hurrah' type deal. The Pens were faster, more aggressive and it felt like we were in that series with a lot of smoke and mirrors. In that series, you could tell who was the team on the way out and the team on the way in.
The forum only goes back to late 2012 but my posts since well before then were saying that Holland either needs to go big (i.e. acquire high-end talent to replace the leaving old guard whatever the cost) or rebuild. In those days, Holland didn't go for broke i.e. he didn't want to overpay on FAs, didn't want to give up assets in trades. But he also didn't trade what viable and desirable assets we still had away for futures. Instead we settled in as an 'OK team'.
And I had criticized Holland for that way, way back. I wasn't the only one, though it was a very select group back then.
There were a number of reasons I felt that way. The main one was that our top 4 D-men were about to be decimated. Lidstrom and Rafalski were on the way out. Chelios was gone. Kronwall was never convincing as a high-end #1.
At forward, our main guys were 30+ and injuries were a factor. I remember the arguments about adding Hossa and how we needed that extra scoring winger. We never got that extra scoring winger. Instead we relied on Franzen who outside that one playoff run never was a high-end player. D and Z were getting older. It didn't take a genius to figure that unless something drastic happened with a rapidly worsening D and ageing forwards, we'd get worse on a reliable curve.
Holland didn't do anything drastic, he made window-dressing moves to prolong the streak. That infuriated me even then. Because it wasn't even 'let's go for broke and make a run while we can'. It wasn't even 'let's try to make the most of what we still have of Z's and D's primes'. It was 'ho hum I don't wanna get caught out, we just need an OK team'. If Holland wasn't bold enough to go for broke, we should have started the rebuild 5 years ago, not now.