We might be misunderstanding each other. I never advocated tanking or sucking. I've said multiple times how happy I am with this surprisingly good team. I have no wish to see Domi, Tatar and Drouin stop playing well, in the hopes of a lucky draft number. But if we want success, there will be risk. Thus far, no market has abandoned its team for taking calculated risks to pursue a Cup.
All I've been saying is pick a timeline and aim for it. If Kotkaniemi and Suzuki look to enter their primes in, say, two years, then build the strongest roster you can for that future date. Who will be better by then? Who will be declining? If we can acquire a great prospect for Petry, Byron, Weber, etc., then in two years that prospect will likely have a bigger impact than the two-years-older vet we traded away. Every recent Cup winner has a strong homegrown core of stars. Habs haven't had that in years. The approach of buying UFAs and trading for quick-fixes has left us nowhere. The team can remain fun and competitive while trading up for better picks or prospects.
again what you are asking the owner to do is to potentially forgo years of playoff revenue for the chance of potentially, possibly going further in one specific year provided everything (that he can't control) lines up perfectly to give us some amorphous " increased chance" of winning it all. its a moving target, shoot now and hope fore the best wont work.
We have some good prospects, but it is clear that the time they will take to develop, is completely uncertain. Things happen. We sign KK because we need a center, we trade for domi who was billed from the jump as a winger who has played really well down the middle. There is nothing wrong with having a plan, but having a plan that doesnt account for things which you cannot control makes no sense, especially when this plan is based on player projections. there are no takebacks in trades, you move a guy out and then realise with him back you are better positioned, you screwed yourself.
The best things the habs can do is 1) identify team strengths and weaknesses and try to increase the former and decrease the latter. Shipping out byron and weber NOW because you think that their replacements ( they will have to be replaced) will be ready in X time frame makes the team worse now for some potential gain at some later date. and if it doesnt work, we are bad immediately and bad in the future where we get to ship out a whole nother set of players for the " new plan" that will be implmented in some indeterminate time frame.
it would be great if we could, from here on out, exclusively sign players to short term deals so that if they DON'T work out we can jettison them. But the players you CAN sign to these terms, are not the players that are going to help you get over the hump.
I also think, that this notion of dumping players for some amorphous gains in the future kills team chemisty. Losing is a cancer, and once you get a team ok with losing because you are telling them than someday someone is gonna ride in on their white horse and reverse the teams fortunes, that this is actually PART of the plan, you are screwing the team and killing the players who hate losing to the point where even if they scratch an itch, you have to move them because they threaten your " hope for the best" plan.
Guys getting shipped because they said they didnt like losing, that would never happen in montreal now would it ?