Just for reference:
Chevy got his job two years before Nill. Bergevin got his a year before. Kekalainen a couple months before. Treliving, Benning, MacLellan, Sakic, and Rutherford all got theirs a year afterward.
Let's ignore MacLellan and Rutherford as they inherited two of the best cores in the entire NHL. First, let's look at some of their stats (I'll only count full seasons for those hired mid-season):
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I won't comment too much on this - I think these numbers paint a clear picture of Nill being average at worst. Some of these teams have obviously been worse (Vancouver, for instance). Colorado is tough because they should've been much better than they were for some time, but they seem to be there now.
One thing to note, as well: only two players who were on the roster in 2012-2013 are still there (Benn and Oleksiak, who I'm not totally sure should count). Faksa, Klingberg, and Lindell were the only prospects leftover who actually ended up doing anything and staying with the team.
I like this approach, as well as the unanswerable "who would be clearly better," or "who would I like bette I suspect most fans judge the team/GM/players against some
mythical, doesn't exist GM, rather than compare them to actual GM's and what has actually happened, which is they all make mistakes at some point. It basically takes some repeated lotto ball luck to build a dynasty, and I'll bet there are some Pens and Hawks fans out there blasting their teams for "only" winning three SC, LOL.
Taken together, I think most of the decisions, even those that went wrong, are pretty justifiable it you look at the sum total of the circumstances at the time. Even the bad UFA, i.e., Niemi, we don't know exactly what other goalies were asking or willing to come to what was a terrible team, that he couldn't have signed even if we wanted him to. And, the darling target, Cam Talbot, ended up not being great, either. Again, we measure Niemi against some mythical player that we probably tried to get, but couldn't. Not all UFA just chase the money, and some do, with Nill not willing to pay.
Like the Goligoski situation. He was unpopular with fans, because we never liked the trade. At best, we thought he was a second pairing guy wanting top pairing money. For Nill, the question was simple. Is this guy worth $5.6M for the long term, given cap management, especially when he wasn't a Nill guy? If he wasn't worth the money, then you don't sign him, even knowing there will be some turnover on D (and some turnovers on D,...…). You can't praise Nill for being a good cap manager, and then knock him for this move.
For that matter, it's not hard to see why Lites and TG went with Nill. Among similar candidates, they felt comfortable working with Nill because Lites has worked with him before. Everyone else was a total crap shoot.
And lastly, it is hard to build a long term competitive team. Things just have to fall right, but with the randomness of events, they rarely do. And, I wonder about the "let's just get in the playoffs" mentality. It seems the Cowboys back in the day were seen to have not won as many SB as they could have, and part of that was blamed on the mentality of being just good enough and seeing where the chips fall. It might be mostly true, and the opposite, i.e. building up at the TDL for one better chance at a run, has it's downfalls too. In a cap world, the shooting stars burn out pretty quickly.
