I’m not really a bergevin fan to be honest, I jsut don’t agree with you guys. I never thought the 2012 team was good enough, it didn’t have the support needed and there wasn’t much that could be traded out to acquire more talent.
both those statements don't match up with what took place.
- 3 straight 100+ point seasons (suggests the core was pretty strong)
- top-10, even top-5 ranked prospect pool during that window (suggests there were lots of assets that were highly rated, and could have been used to target the 1 top-6 player and 1 top 4 player any reasonable observer could see was all that we lacked to have a contending team rather than a pretending team).
You can make up as much bs as you want, the hard facts don't go anywhere.
What you’re saying is that once the core was decidedly not good enough and it was moved, the team got worse as it became clear they were no longer a playoff team. Shocker. You can blame it solely on Bergevin or look at the fact that the team wasn’t deep enough to be able to move assets and maintain competitiveness.
except, that isn't how he did that.
Gainey, in 08 i believe, made the call that his core wasn't good enough... in one summer he made fundamental changes to the core to take a different direction. Agree with him or not, he was decisive and made moves in accordance with a pretty visible plan/intention.
MB has ended up dismantling the core he inherited more by accident than dedicated intention, culminating in last years ugly Pacioretty and Galch divorces.
Again, you can make up things to support an otherwise baseless narrative, but you can't change the facts of how MB got to today's roster.... or do you not recall his "our defense is better" summer lol
What is failing about my memory? The great core never sniffed a good playoff run. It sounds like you would have found a way to give our **** prospects and future first round picks away for average rentals that would not have won anything. You’d be perpetuating the **** cycle rather than realizing the team is ****ed and needs to start keeping its picks.
apparently a lot. your comments are quite divorced from what actually took place...
You seem to either not be fully reading the posts you are quoting, or jumbling lots of different discussions into one.
Let me clarify, again. Management needs to have a plan & follow it (with course corrections/adjustments to be made along the way). MB failed to do that through his 8th season as a GM, that kind of leadership is outside of this tool box.
You are wrong to insinuate "what i would do" beyond what i've told you, which is to pick a path and commit to it. go all-in to try and win asap around the vet core you have, or identify that you lack the necessary pieces for a successful run, and in that case focus on acquiring them in a rebuild. A rebuild can take several seasons (so-called "5-year plans", see the Bolts), or it can be a pretty quick process (see the Bruins)... in-between those two clear paths, you've got all the weaker GM's who lack the vision or confidence to chart a path and execute on it... MB falls near the bottom of that group.
it doesn't help your argument at all to make hyberbolic accusations about what i would have done. But i can tell you I certainly wouldn't have let a prospect like Tinordi end up in John Scott... or Scherbak and DLR into waiver fodder.
MB himself make two decent trades with prospect/picks from that first 1/2 of his tenure, getting Vanek for Colberg (didn't work out) and Petry for a 2nd (worked out fantastic)... both were good trades (even if Vanek/Therrien not meshing was kind of obvious)... shame he didn't have the sense or ability to better manage that top-10 prospect pool and use those assets to improve the great core he inherited, instead of letting his poorly chosen coaches muck up the development to the point that only 2 of them came close to their mid-level potential (Galch/Lehk) and toxifying the relationship with the core to the point of 2 of the 3 best assets he acquired were moved while still in their prime and in contentious/confrontational circumstances he fully created.
Bad manager is a bad manager. No amount of revisionist history can change what he did and the outcomes he created.
Furthermore, no one thought the team would be middle of the pack last year. Sorry. You guys were on another Bergevin ether binge and though Domi would have 4 goals and the team would suck to high heaven. It didn't.
Well, as I said, I did. And i recall several other posters saying similar things... perhaps you chose not to actually read the things you didn't agree with?
I didn't think it was likely that Domi would excel as he did, nor that Tatar/Danault/Drouin/Armia et. et. would all have career years.
I didn't think, or bank on, us having league best injury luck
I didn't know how well Weber would handle coming back, he ended up roughly as i expected, maybe a bit more offensively productive...
I was wrong on JKO, didn't think he should stay with the big team.
I was right on Price, bet he would bounce back and show he's still a top-5 goalie
and on and on... i think we all make a series of bets/predictions, with varying degrees of accuracy.
But what was pretty clear to some, myself included, and well posted... Was that the team we had was a stretch to make the playoffs. Most things would need to go right (and they did), for the team to have a chance at sniffing the playoffs (which is what happened).
Had any serious injury affected Price or one of our few top-6/top-4, we'd have fallen off sooner (Weber being out until X-kmas was a known factor).
Had the bulk of our top-9 forwards not had PB years, we'd have fallen off sooner.
Had young players like JKO, Mete, Kulak not exceeded expectations, we'd have fallen off sooner.
So yeah, the team was what many thought it was... One that needed a lot of luck to just-miss the playoffs...
Precisely where we sit again this year.
