He's been our GM for six seasons now.
- Has gone through multiple head coaches.
- Has a poor drafting record.
- Has a terrible track record in signing unrestricted free agents.
- Has a new goaltending tandem every couple seasons.
- Is coming off one of the worst off-seasons in franchise history.
How did this man get a contract extension? He deserves to be fired.
- Hartley wasn't his guy. Gully was, and Tre had the balls to turf him after 2 seasons when things weren't working great and he had a guy he really wanted available. From certain rumors, it seems like ownership does not want to spend money on a coach. Dude's hands are tied.
- How do you justify the poor drafting? If Bennett is your only example, that's more on the development than drafting.
- Don't disagree on UFA. But we can't have everything. At least his weakness is UFA and not other aspects.
- OK, sure on the goalie thing. But it's not like he wasn't in the mix for guys like Andersen, Murray, Bishop x 2, Fleury etc. and those are just the ones we've heard rumors of. I bet he's been asking about a ton of other guys as well. The price just never made sense to him. Though we likely don't find Rittich if we had been top price in ponying up enough for someone who is a legit starter.
- Worst off season? Lucic contract really sucks, but for a Neal swap, it's not remotely close to trading a star player away for a bag of pucks and hockey tape.
He concentrated on the defence at the expense of forward depth and depth of draft picks. Tried to fast track the rebuild. The Treliving apologists will point to a few contracts and the Carolina trade but at the end of the day he has shown himself to be a poor cap manager and filled the team up with expensive 3rd/4th liners. Today's NHL is predicated on speed/skill up front which we severely lack.
Tried to fast track the rebuild? Dude showed up for the 2015 season and the mandate from ownership was playoffs rather than tank for for McDavid. High picks for Dougie still made sense as a rebuild move.
Seriously, look at the 2015 roster list. You can complain about some expensive 3rd and 4th liners right now, but a few seasons ago, those 3rd and 4th liners were in our top 6 and we had no expectation of a steady line of talent on the farm to draw from. Treliving has addressed the methodology of drafting from the 2014 draft which was bad and everything since 2015 has been solid AF. The only perhaps problem is that he's been trading away a ton of picks since then rather than giving Button more runway to work with.
Treliving has also worked ridiculously tirelessly with little to no fanfare to fix the farm system ranging from fixing the stupid travel (Abbotsford had a horrific travel schedule that made them constantly go back and forth across the continent), location (Abbotsford, Adirondack then Stockton) and alignment issue with the team (farm in Adirondack which is harder to monitor and recall than somewhere like Cali/Abbotsford). Ultimately he still identified it as an issue and went in to repair it even though it's not a sexy GM move.
He's also significantly revamped training of prospects by retooling development camp as a time for prospects to develop vs fight to impress. This is a better longer term solution and it educates the young guys in things like nutrition, health (mental and other wise), social media, substance abuse, proper work outs etc.
I'm not going to herald Treliving as a dude who deserves a life sized statue in front of our arena. But anyone thinking we're in bad hands and worse off with him at the helm must really have a bad memory. Dude is easily above average overall for his body of work as a GM and there's a ton of under the hood tweaks he has done that the organization will benefit from for a long, long time. If you hate him that much, see how hard it is to select 10 options that are hands down superior to him of current GM. Even 5 current GM and 5 up and coming AGM isn't an easy feat.