I voted F, and this is coming from someone who has been giving Sather a lot of credit the past few years.
Good moves:
Stempniak - Good depth player at a cheap price.
Agreed
Dorsett - Too expensive for a 4th liner.
Eh. I'd rather have kept him than sign Glass. But preferably I'd rather have neither.
Cheap vets - Some stick and some don't, but it is good to have depth that doesn't incur cap penalties from the AHL. The 2nd year on Lombardi's deal was not very good though.
Lombardi can be buried so does it really matter?
Terrible moves:
Strålman/Boyle swap - Letting our 2nd best defenceman go for a declining vet, who does fill a need but opens up an even bigger hole.
I don't have an opinion on this until we see how Staal-Boyle play.
Brassard/Zuccarello extensions - Brassard should've gotten the 1-year contract and Zucc the long term extension. Brass is a PP specialist who is below average 5v5 and has been carried by his linemates in that situation, while Zucc may be the best forward on the team. We'll regret Brassard's contract when Zucc demands $6.5M on his next deal.
Brassard got his contract just for being a center. It's the going rate for them now. I don't love it, but I don't hate it like some here do. I do not think Zuccarello is not the best forward on the team, and he shouldn't be paid like it. But giving him a 1 year deal DEFINITELY has the potential to bite us in the ass.
Glass - Not a potentially crippling mistake as the above two, but just an all around bad move signing perhaps the worst non-goon in the league to that contract.
Pretty much
Draft - The goalie lottery tickets might become something, but I was hugely unimpressed with the picks - especially considering the talent that was falling through the draft. I thought the team would learn that picking talent over intangibles/size is the the best strategy after the 2013 draft.
I don't really agree. There were some picks I felt we could've done better on, but this was a draft to fill needs. We had no top picks, and the draft was garbage anyway. We got two HRHR offensive defensemen, two goalies that are thought very highly of, and a really rough player in Keegan Iverson. Nejezchleb I know nothing about, and I don't like the Mantha pick. I don't think you can have a lot of drafts like (so far) our 2013 draft is looking. Two very high quality players dropped like rocks, in a draft that was already tremendously deep. 2015 is definitely the draft to go all out with those swing-for-the-fences picks, but not this draft IMO. You need players from every draft.
(Girardi extension) - Not really this offseason as it was signed during the 13/14 season, but that contract will haunt us unless the cap rises fast the coming years.
Seriously on the fence with Girardi's extension. I'm caught between not liking his game at all, but having no better options to play 24+ minutes a game.
Sather might be bailed out by the kids (Duclair, Miller, Fast) stepping up, but that doesn't affect his grade in my book.
Can you really use the term "bailed about by the kids"? I mean, he did draft/sign/whatever them with the intention of filling roles on the team. It's not like they came out of nowhere. Maybe their progress is why he didn't make certain moves?