This organization is shipping off quite a lot of players for JR’s screw ups and Sullivan’s ego.
If we lose Rust, we will have shipped Kessel, Sheary, Rust, Cole and Sprong off strictly because 1. Sullivan didn’t like them or 2. Rutherford has to pay off a team to take one of his screw up free agency signings.
The Sprong trade worked out so far, though.
We can’t continue to strike out at the draft, give away players Sully doesn’t like or have to include a player in a trade for someone to take one of our many free agency duds.
I wonder which player we will lose to make a team take Tanev or who will be shipped off for being in Sullivan’s doghouse next.
This is revisionist history mixed with Monday Morning Quarterbacking. Let’s go through your lame assessment one by one. Kessel was traded Because the team obviously needed a shake up and Kessel was not playing the way the team wanted and it was time for a change. I am fine with trading Kessel after 2 years of not meeting our goal it was time for a big change and Rutherford has added 4 fast wingers in the past 5 months (McCann, Kahun, Galchenyuk, and Tanev). It was time for a mix up.
Sheary is a dime a dozen player and would be lucky to even be in our lineup and was no big loss at all. I don’t see Sheary as any better than any player in our top 9. I have no problem with the return for a marginal player. We used that pick to move up to get Legare. Along with a 5th and 7th round pick. I for one saw no future with Sheary on this team.
Rust hasn’t happened so dumb to discuss.
Cole was going to be a UFA that was not in the plans to sign and was part of the deal to get Brassard who was one of the biggest fish available on the deadline. I don’t think anyone thought that was a bad deal at th time adding “Big Game Brass”. Obviously not all players work out but I would never fault Rutherford for trading for Brassard.
With Sprong we got great return for a player that I believe will be out of the league in a short while. Getting a 22 year old rookie defenseman on entry level contract that had a great rookie season and looks like a defenseman that can be in our top 4 for years to come is great value even if Sprong fixes his game and becomes a complete winger which I doubt.
Also how have we struck out of the draft? Since Rutherford has taken over we used picks to get Kessel which was great value. We used a 1st to get Perron who just won a Cup and played well for the Blues. Unfortunately he was not working out for us but we traded him for Hagelin who helped us win two Cups. We traded picks and two UFA’s for McCann and Bjugstad which is great value considering they both are past 1st round picks and have more value than what we gave up in picks. I could go on but I think we used our picks great considering we are in win now mode and still got players with term and not wasting picks on rentals like Shero always did.
Also I love Our last two drafts for the picks we had. Also I like how the Pens find players older than draft eligible players with later picks to find players that can help early like Simon. Most players drafted that late don’t play in the NHL for 5+ years or ever so I like adding one player like that each draft.
We can always find moves that don’t work out because you can find that with any team. When looking at the Pens only 1 player on our team I would want to get rid of and that is JJ. Looks like Rutherford is on his way to doing it or at least is working on it. The one thing I love about Rutherford is he does not take long to make changes when players are not working out. Rutherford identified the player to go and made the right choice. Rutherford has made this team younger and faster around the core in a 6 month time he transformed our team into one of the younger teams around our core in the NHL with only Hornqvist older than 27 of our supporting cast forwards. If JJ goes then our defenseman surrounding Letang will also all be in their 20’s. Rutherford has definitely lengthened our competitive window due to these changes of a younger faster lineup.
Some of you are just insufferable and if most of these complainers had their way we would have not had any of our last 3 Cups. Go back to those threads and see how many of these same complainers wanted to tank for picks in each of our Cup years when we had bad first half’s. I am glad we have a real Hall of Fame GM and not all these arm chair sky is falling fake wannabe GM’s.
