Without going through your post in detail, I find myself wondering how much input Hitchcock was giving on player moves. Especially with Cole for Bortuzzo, Polak for Gunnarsson, Oshie for Brouwer. If your coach came to you and said, I think we need more of X, as a GM I think there is probably an obligation to try and get your coach what he needs. Of course, if you don't like what your coach is telling you, or feel that he should be able to win with the pieces you gave him, maybe you start looking for a different coach.According to some, ... how many trades has he made here? All of those, except perhaps one, the Miller trade - and even that he still gets at least 3/4 credit for because ... the grandeur that continues to be Steve Ott.
Honestly, I'm not sure we needed to move anyone. We needed stability in net. We needed confidence in the team from above. DA wasn't willing to give any of that because he was so fixated on being declared right, being called the smartest guy in the room, that he wasn't about to let anyone tell him he was wrong.
Well, yes - for that season, he can claim that. Longer term? Last year, 2 guys dealt away by DA were going to win the Cup; if it hadn't been Oshie and Eller, it was going to be Reaves and Perron. Cole was on the two years prior for Pittsburgh. [And Eller getting traded, I get at the time - so I'll ignore him for the rest of this.]
But ... we've got a 3rd-pairing defenseman who's defensively reliable for the 55-60 games he's healthy, a highly skilled forward still working on getting his act together in the AHL, Barbashev [who ... is he a top-6 guy? A bottom-6 guy? Both? Neither?], and a 2016 WCF appearance that we blew with home ice advantage [after nearly blowing both prior series with a 3-1 lead and Game 5 at home, and a 3-2 lead with Game 6 at home]. And, a team that after 30 games maybe is finally getting its act together - but who really knows. [And who knows what our glorious GM is going to do to "improve" things before the trade deadline.]
I'll put it this way: when Joe Thornton was traded to San Jose, the Bruins got back Marco Sturm, Brad Stuart, and Wayne Primeau. No one in their right mind thinks that JT was "only" worth that in late 2005; however, the Bruins were only talking to a few teams and were relatively desperate to move him and so they took considerably less than what they could have had by putting him on the open market. [And of course, after the fact it was Joe had off-ice issues and then it was we won the Stanley Cup before he did, so it was all worth it and so on - ignoring that nothing the Bruins got in that trade did squat toward pushing the Bruins to the Cup in '11.]
I think people give DA more credit than he deserves. I think DA only talked to a few teams about dealing Oshie, despite his comments to the contrary. I think he was hell-bent on "doing something" and didn't care about actually getting fair value, he was moving a guy out to show everyone I'm really serious when I say I'm making changes and Oshie was the convenient scapegoat, the fans' Abuse Boy, the easy target whose move would satisfy the fan base and gain him support and take away attention from the past 3 years of playoff disappointments and any scrutiny of DA's role in those failures.
My point is simply that I could absolve Armstrong for some of those moves if he was collaborating with Hitchcock for specific elements he wanted. Its hard to argue that with Brouwer so much, because they didn't make much effort to re-sign him. So maybe Hitchcock had something against Oshie or felt subtracting him was important. I'm talking myself out of this with regard to Oshie.
Its ultimately Armstrong's responsibility.