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Hall had terrific years for the Oilers, diminished only by eastern media bias. He had years that were substantially better than any year in Lucic's career, even his very best for Boston. Hall drives play and he more or less did from the first time he set foot on NHL ice. He is pedigreed to a degree that only a handful of NHLers have ever been (being ultra-elite from the age of 12 or younger). I don't need to defend Hall to anyone in the real world, but somehow there are still those that seek to diminish him on HF.
Lucic was always a phantasm of eastern media, he was a McGuffin for hobbled management teams to pine after -- "todays" powerforward! But aside from 1 or 2 seasons, he has almost always been "yesterdays" power forward. Eastern promises. Hall is still young but he has many seasons that outclass anything Lucic ever produced -- even Hall's injury riddled seasons typically produced better results than an average Lucic season.
People who are inexplicably defensive of the organization beyond all merit had to resort to manufacturing personality concerns with Hall. The guy who roomed with McDavid, who spent his free time with McDavid, trained with him at biosteel, --- they must have hated each other. Thats why the trade happened. He's a jealous ego-monster! Nothing ever suggested this, nothing ever corroborated it.
Hall had top 10 seasons (NHL scoring) on the Oilers. Lucic has never done anything like that and never will. Hall literaly had to be the best player in the NHL for people who are SO bent over backwards and SO wrapped up in their own lies and conceits to finally admit they had the wool over their eyes. Its frankly utterly ridiculous and it proves that objective facts are completely out of reach for pitifully large number of HFBoarders.
You also attacked Eberle, who is basically a bonafide scoring winger in the NHL, one of the top 30 scorers over a period stretching back to the beginning of his career. These talents are not easily replaceable- 90% of NHL teams understand this. It had a major impact losing that scoring last year. Even reliable 50 point players are not that common in todays NHL. Ty Rattie has proven nothing in the NHL so far, and many wingers (read: all of them so far who had a large sample size) have failed to produce reliably with McDavid.
Lucic was one of the worst signings in recent history and has already had a substantial negative effect on the team's ability to compete. If he doesn't completely change his stripes (when does this ever happen?), then he needs to be sewered -- and yet the dynamics of management, ownership, and coaching will not allow it. He is absolutely the worst kind of anchor, and the whole situation is engineered to make it nearly impossible to fix. Its disgusting.
I miss the days when as a fan base we had to deal with mistakes being made, but they were rational, defensible mistakes with thought processes that could be understood clearly. What we have now is farcical -- and we know from experience as a fan base that even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. If Rattie is an acorn, GREAT. I am still a fan, I just can't abide the "fake news" that we are being inundated with - and it is often spun by our own self-flagellating associates here on HFBoards. Insufferably.
We should be able to confidently rely on our team to spend Sekera's LTIR and make this team playoff-competitive -- but we had a ton of leftover cap last year with holes that other teams readily filled in front of us. As a fanbase, we know this team is just a few pieces from being in contention, but no one should have faith that management will do anything about it. They haven't in the past. (See last years empty capspace). Or they've gone the wrong way, or plugged the wrong hole, or added a Griffin Reinhart when they needed a Dougie Hamilton. And we know that they're vindictive -- and we know that they will hold up a deal over 200K, and we know that they'll blow 2.5 million and an NMC on another just to make it happen. Its all proof that priorities are off, intentions are unclear, and we're rambling drunk toward the finish line. We might still get there. NHL executives aren't exactly Google-caliber. There are still cigar-chomping old-boys, famous players taking a spin, guys who had no hockey experience -- any dope can find himself running a team, it seems. So maybe our dope will come up aces. Fingers crossed.