Evaluating the Rebuild

[dumbdick]

Our rebuild came up in another thread and I thought enough time may have passed to map out and evaluate our rebuild trades.

Feel free to chime in if I'm missing any other pieces.

Our Trades:
Fisher - Traded for 1st and 3rd picks - Noesen and Maidens
Campoli - Traded for a 2nd round pick.
Kelly - Traded for a 2nd round pick.

The sens used two 2nds to move up and get Puempel in 2011. One of them was our own, but to avoid having to talk about about trading Campoli for "half of Puempel", or to talk about some mystery counterfactual player we didn't draft with our own 2nd pick had we not made the trade, I'll simplify and pretend that the two picks we used to get Puempel were the ones we traded for.

So essentially our rebuild trades consisted of trading Kelly, Fisher and Campoli for Puempel, Maidens and Noesen.

Results:
Obviously Maidens didn't work out.
I'll be generous and say that Silf, Noesen and the 1st we traded for Ryan were of roughly equal value, so Noesen was essentially traded for 1/3rd of Bobby Ryan.
The jury is still out on Puempel.

In retrospect, I think I'd much rather have Kelly and Fisher than 1/3rd of Bobby Ryan and Matt Puempel. We certainly didn't run away with those trades in my mind.

What do you think, how do you see these trades in retrospect and would you do things differently in hindsight?

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[CanadianHockey]

I wasn't a particular proponent of the blow-it-up approach. Swap Elliott for Andy, retain that roster, see what happens. Hard to say without knowing the internal culture of the team. Perhaps everyone was too comfortable and too complacent. Perhaps we just had shoddy goaltending and Andy would have turned us around.

 

[StefanW]

The rebuild itself was fine.

IMO the issue was that even though we got a lot younger, and replaced aging vets with a younger core (something the OP does not discuss, but is the entire point of a rebuild), the rebuild ended up being derailed at a key moment.

At the exact point where we had a competitive team with a cheap payroll we were primed to capitalize and become a contending team. Instead, the budget sank from beneath the feet of the organization and the rest is history. If we were able to stock up (i.e. still sign MacArthur, trade for Ryan, keep Alfie and add another top 4 D and other pieces) we are a competitive team for a long time.

**** happens.

 

[Benjamin]

Wasn't a rebuild. It was a focus on youth while still trying to win.

All we've gotten from it is a younger but no better team.

 

[Super Cake]

Time to rebuild the rebuild.

 

[Rals]

I'm going to assume Nashville & Fisher would have found each other no matter what position sens were in.

 

[ReginKarlssonLehner]

Wasn't a rebuild. It was a focus on youth while still trying to win.

All we've gotten from it is a younger but no better team.

Talent is there.

Ryan and Hoffman could be first line wingers soon enough(Ryan already is)

Stone, Chiasson, MacArthur great 2nd line wingers.

Zibanejad good 1st line center. Turris excellent line 2 center. Lazar 1b center.

Ceci top pairing defender. Cowen top 3 defender. Claesson/Wikstrand/Englund top 4-5-6 defenders.

All we need is patience, bigger budget and one more top flight prospects which we are all on par for.

The only real stretch is the number 1 C spot and perhaps Hoffman but bigger budget/plethora of prospects/high draft pick = fixable if they falter.

Depending on the top flight prospect/young player, the rebuild could end next year or potentially the year after.

We aren't in rebuild now, we're in a developing period if you may.

 

[Micklebot]

Our rebuild came up in another thread and I thought enough time may have passed to map out and evaluate our rebuild trades.

Feel free to chime in if I'm missing any other pieces.

Our Trades:
Fisher - Traded for 1st and 3rd picks - Noesen and Maidens
Campoli - Traded for a 2nd round pick.
Kelly - Traded for a 2nd round pick.

The sens used two 2nds to move up and get Puempel in 2011. One of them was our own, but to avoid having to talk about about trading Campoli for "half of Puempel", or to talk about some mystery counterfactual player we didn't draft with our own 2nd pick had we not made the trade, I'll simplify and pretend that the two picks we used to get Puempel were the ones we traded for.

So essentially our rebuild trades consisted of trading Kelly, Fisher and Campoli for Puempel, Maidens and Noesen.

Results:
Obviously Maidens didn't work out.
I'll be generous and say that Silf, Noesen and the 1st we traded for Ryan were of roughly equal value, so Noesen was essentially traded for 1/3rd of Bobby Ryan.
The jury is still out on Puempel.

In retrospect, I think I'd much rather have Kelly and Fisher than 1/3rd of Bobby Ryan and Matt Puempel. We certainly didn't run away with those trades in my mind.

What do you think, how do you see these trades in retrospect and would you do things differently in hindsight?

You missed Elliot for Anderson which obviously worked out in a big way (unless you see him winning us games as a bad thing because we could have had better draft picks)

Also missed Kovalev for a 7th rd pick (Dzingle)

The bigger issue is we made room for young players on the roster. If we still had Fisher and Kelly, we likely don't make the move for Turris, Condra and Greening don't get call-up (well that might have been a positive for Greening at least).

To me though, the rebuild (or retool imo) wasn't successful because of two factors; unexpected departures of key players (Spezza was likely considered a long term solution to our #1 center positon at the time, and Alfredsson was certainly expected to retire a Sen) and the tightening of the budget resulting in us focusing in long term development of our D rather than retaining positions for key veterans (ie replace both Kuba and Gonchar when we decided to move on from them instead of just one with Methot).

I think had we been able to sign a vet Dman to fill the void left by Gonchar, we'd probably be in a much better spot right now. Both Visnovsky and Streit were availble options at the time but were passed on because of a low Budget and desire to go long term with youth.

 

[Benjamin]

Talent is there.

Ryan and Hoffman could be first line wingers soon enough(Ryan already is)

Stone, Chiasson, MacArthur great 2nd line wingers.

Zibanejad good 1st line center. Turris excellent line 2 center. Lazar 1b center.

Ceci top pairing defender. Cowen top 3 defender. Claesson/Wikstrand/Englund top 4-5-6 defenders.

All we need is patience, bigger budget and one more top flight prospects which we are all on par for.

The only real stretch is the number 1 C spot and perhaps Hoffman but bigger budget/plethora of prospects/high draft pick = fixable if they falter.

Depending on the top flight prospect/young player, the rebuild could end next year or potentially the year after.

We aren't in rebuild now, we're in a developing period if you may.

And the chances of all those players panning out like that are?

 

[Bob Kudelski]

The trades were fine. It was the drafting that wasn't great. If Murray had drafted two of Boone Jenner, Kucherov, Saad or Jurco instead of Noesen and Puempel, things would look A LOT better. That being said, we don't know what we've got with Puempel yet - the jury's still out.

 

[Lenny the Lynx]

10/10, would build again

 

[DrakeAndJosh]

I wouldn't trade Puempel for Kelly and Fisher right now. It was time to move on and I'm glad we did.

 

[NyQuil]

Go on the Boston board and see how desperate they are to unload Kelly.

 

[TeamRenzo]

The rebuild isnt over yet. We need to understand which of our younger players will mature to their expected or hopeful roles.

 

[Bileur]

It was a half effort rebuild. More of a retool really. We didn't go fully in the tank and didn't come out of it with the star players you often get when you do go fully in the tank. Not surprising.

 

[Lenny the Lynx]

The rebuild isnt over yet. We need to understand which of our younger players will mature to their expected or hopeful roles.

The whole concept of a rebuild is kind of silly to me.

The fact that we traded a few vets for draft picks one year was significant but doesn't make it one event in time, with everything since being a direct result.

All teams are in a continuous state of re-building - its a total grey area.

 

[thinkwild]

i agree Lenny. It still amazes me that from ‘Peak Sens’ to now, that we consider the “rebuild” to have been trading away Fisher and Kelly.

After a decade and a half of patient building and developing, getting one elite player a year at times, we finally had an odds-on favourite in Vegas. This was followed by a lockout to lockout period of slowly bleeding away mostly salary cap mandated elite players once a year starting with Hossa, Chara, Havlat, Redden, Heatley, Vermette, Meszaros, Volchenkov. Then one year when it was obvious we would miss the playoffs, and so did the standard move expected and were deadline sellers of two character veterans that the Oilers would surely have benefited from, we got a few first rounders.

Following that one year as deadline sellers, Alfie retired and then we traded Spezza, finally leaving us with no real first line for the first time in a long time.

And somehow, we look at this timeline and deduce that the ‘rebuild’ was the one year when we traded Fisher and Kelly. Some even thought we had accomplished a zero year rebuild. It seems to me that this dubious expectation is the cause of much of our angst.

The idea that that from one deadline as sellers, of two non-elite players and Kovy, and starting from where we were in the standings, that we’d done enough on its own to constitute a complete rebuild is incomprehensible to me. That it could, and should, actually be that easy and that if we don’t accomplish: first a return to a playoff bubble team, and then on to contender status in a 3 year period, that we have actually failed .. that seems an expectation that is not only naïve and impatient, but quite out of character for a Sens fan base that has so much experience and pride in our ability to patiently draft and develop a contender and knows how long it took last time.

I don’t know exactly why the constant fan references to our rebuild, something management has seldom agreed to, bothers me so. Maybe partially because of exactly that expression of the idea, that there is an easy, quick, mathematically probable shortcut to build a contender, one that we can take while all the other teams are foolishly trying it the long way, and that it can be done in 3 years after trading away a couple of vets at the deadline, and one year after the old team has spiraled down to the bottom of the standings.

If there was ever a ‘one year rebuild’, I would think it was last year. We traded away our #1 C, an elite offensive point getter, for picks and prospects at a time where we finally had a pretty good foundation of young players and a stocked farm system to start from. Then we committed to being the lowest cap spending team in a year when there were potentially generational talents available while developing a lot of youth. This at least looks like a rebuild with a chance. We acknowledged again we were going to get worse before getting better which is partially what rebuild means to me. This at least is a position from which we can start looking at a potential 3 year horizon to contender status from. But even that is only if everything goes perfectly. Developing and building a contender was not done in 3 years by any of the current champs, nor by us last time.

The rebuild is over. The hard development begins. It will hopefully be a long time before we are thinking of “rebuilding” again. I'd think we'd need to build something first.

 

[Filatov2Kovalev2Bonk]

The rebuild has been stunted by abnormal loyalty to deteriorating, near useless players like Neil and Phillips. Karlsson is our only elite player. Ryan, Mac, Turris...all great second line guys but not elite, elite being 80-100 points.

This is on Melnyk/Murray as they felt (perhaps with some justification) that the town would not support a full rebuild.

What I would have done:
Ride out the season with Elliott and get Landeskog. Make a pitch for ANderson during free agency or an aggressive trade push for him at that point.

Dump Neil to the Rangers, who apparently wanted to offer him a much higher salary.
Do not re-sign Phillips.
Do not re-sign Michalek.
Use the cap space from the last two to go for a top four defenceman to help Karlsson.

Keep Mac and those guys, go from there.

 

[NyQuil]

The Michalek signing was an odd move.

Spezza was out, Michalek clearly is not the same player post-surgeries.

 

[harvey]

right on thinkwild

We now have a team with only 2 veteran lifer team members in Niel and Philips maybe in the last year of their careers.

The old guard are all gone, along with whatever baggage was with them and we now have assembled a very young and green team that hopefully in 3 or 4 years of hard development will become the next chicago/LA.

There will be more changes and at key points key UFAs will be added, but it will fun to watch this young group develop.

Takes me back to the last time watching a young team with chara, redden, alfie, spezza, heatley, volchenkov etc etc make a run at the cup.

 

[Micklebot]

The rebuild has been stunted by abnormal loyalty to deteriorating, near useless players like Neil and Phillips. Karlsson is our only elite player. Ryan, Mac, Turris...all great second line guys but not elite, elite being 80-100 points.

This is on Melnyk/Murray as they felt (perhaps with some justification) that the town would not support a full rebuild.

What I would have done:
Ride out the season with Elliott and get Landeskog. Make a pitch for ANderson during free agency or an aggressive trade push for him at that point.

Dump Neil to the Rangers, who apparently wanted to offer him a much higher salary.
Do not re-sign Phillips.
Do not re-sign Michalek.
Use the cap space from the last two to go for a top four defenceman to help Karlsson.

Keep Mac and those guys, go from there.

To be fair, even if we had kept Elliot, we probably wounld't have sucked enough for Landeskog. Anderson was aweful for Colorado, and probably would have continued to not play well for them (if I recall, Elliot actually played as well as Anderson had been playing for them, Elliot didn't make them worse, Anderson made us better). Maybe we move up a spot or two, and get one of Huberdeau, Larsson, or Strome, but Landeskog is probably wishful thinking.

 

[BK201]

We're still in a rebuild. We are not a consistent playoff threat. Montreal is. Montreal had a retool we are in a rebuild.

 

[ChocolateLeclaire]

To be fair, even if we had kept Elliot, we probably wounld't have sucked enough for Landeskog. Anderson was aweful for Colorado, and probably would have continued to not play well for them (if I recall, Elliot actually played as well as Anderson had been playing for them, Elliot didn't make them worse, Anderson made us better). Maybe we move up a spot or two, and get one of Huberdeau, Larsson, or Strome, but Landeskog is probably wishful thinking.

Actually, at that point, the coach and Anderson hated each other so much that Sacco was starting Budaj to spite him. And Budaj was horrible too.

People also forget that along with Anderson came the Bingo youth infusion of Butler, Condra, Greening, etc. that (along with the experience of already playing with Clouston) were extremely hungry and playing out of their minds to insure themselves a roster spot for the following year. Karlsson was also rounding into form at the end of the season as he had started to figure the NHL out.

Anderson gets the "blame" for the team play but it was a myriad of factors that had them winning games they didn't deserve to.

 

[BK201]

To be fair, even if we had kept Elliot, we probably wounld't have sucked enough for Landeskog. Anderson was aweful for Colorado, and probably would have continued to not play well for them (if I recall, Elliot actually played as well as Anderson had been playing for them, Elliot didn't make them worse, Anderson made us better). Maybe we move up a spot or two, and get one of Huberdeau, Larsson, or Strome, but Landeskog is probably wishful thinking.

We were second last in league until Anderson came. We would have had Landeskog.

 

[FireMelnyk]

It's taking as long to build a perennial playoff team out of one that was already built as it did to build one out of nothing (92-96). Not looking good...