Is it just me or is Hughes giving mixed signals as far as a rebuild or retool or whatever the plan is?
I wouldn't say mixed signals, they've been pretty clear that they want to rebuild the organization as a whole to bring development, scouting, coaching, and other elements of the team up to modern standards befitting of the third richest franchise in the sport instead of our previous development team that consisted of the AHL coaching staff and two other guys. They've talked about moving out a lot of guys who don't fit their vision, trying to put together a team that can play faster and emphasizes offence while still being a responsible defensive group. I think Carolina is a basically the model here in terms of blending this tactical way of play with team-building strategy, and that's a team that's been successful despite a shoestring off-ice budget so the potential of taking that vision and adding unlimited hockey ops money is pretty attractive to me.
They've been upfront that the plan is not to turbo tank for Bedard next year and that the team will not be going through a "rebuild" in the sense of the HF Boards consensus of deliberately trying to be bad for multiple years. That doesn't mean mixed signals, it just means their plan is more nuanced than the false dichotomy of either mega tanking or desperately trading picks and prospects to be as good as possible in the short term. They're going to add some vets to replace the guys moved out at the deadline/draft/summer, and they'll probably target a Toffoli replacement like eg. Burakovsky who's a good fit in terms of age and term with the young group. The reason they're being vague about whether it's a 5 year rebuild plan or not is there's no reason to publicly outline a plan in that level of detail, because it realistically can't exist in hockey. Their plan is to essentially hand the keys from Weber/Price/Danault/Petry/Gallagher over to Suzuki/Caufield/Romanov/Guhle/2022 1st and let those young players force their hand to decide when it's time to go for it.
And that would mean continuing on a path that has provided no success since 1993.
I don't agree with this at all. If the new front office does not believe it's in the team's best interest to go into next year targeting a top 3 pick and gut the roster to accomplish that goal, that does not mean they're just Bergevin 2.0, nor does it mean the team is setting itself up to be a low-scoring mediocre group of skaters that relies on rigid defensive play and elite goaltending to compete. It took Marc Bergevin
3413 days to acquire an additional 1st round pick which he traded away immediately. It took Kent Hughes 28 days to get an extra 1st round pick, and 31 days after that to acquire another. The last time we straight up traded a vet for a 1st was 2007. I think it's extremely and unreasonably pessimistic to portray the new front office's direction as merely an extension of what the team's been doing since the 90s given they've just demonstrated they're willing to be extremely aggressive in making moves and implementing their vision of the team, and they've been accumulating assets in a way we've really never seen the Habs do.
A rebuild is more than just moving picks and assets around on the draft table too. Deciding they've had enough of Ducharme and moving him for a coach that would re-establish some passion within the team and put players in situations to succeed is a wholesale change from what the Habs have been doing since 1993. The style of play St. Louis is talking about and what we've seen since the change is something we really have only seen in the lockout-shortened 12-13 season where we played an extremely aggressive 4 line attack under Therrien before he had the chance to implement his defence-first system the following year.
