What a totally undeserved award.
- Iggy chose PIT, Shero did nothing
- Overpaid for Morrow who blew and also chose PIT
- Overpaid for Murray who was too slow for DBs system so Db changed it
- Great deal to get JJ, too bad he never played in the POs.
This is a bunch of crap!! Shero provided the early deals that had Iggy want to choose the Pens. Getting Morrow and Murray first was a big reason Iggy changed his mind from the 3 teams to just the Pens and in his press conference he mentioned those moves as a factor.
As far as overpaying goes no person on these boards would of believed we could of got those 4 players without giving any players off our roster and only 1 top 10 prospect. When you have the team with the top record in the East you go for it now and that means giving up a little of the future to do that. I loved what Shero did and it was to bad Blysma could not make it work because he had all the tools to get it done. I don't think the Bruins are a better team than the Pens. They outplayed us in only 1 game. Games 1, 3, and 4 could of went to either team. It happens sometimes that a team plays poorly for a stretch and we did that at the wrong time. I believe this Pens team was just as good or better than the Bruins and if we played a new 7 game series we could come out on top. Bruins got lucky to make it out of the first round. The Cup is hard to win and it takes some breaks along the way and you are not going to win many games with Sid and Geno not scoring so don't blame the trades on that series.
GM of the year without a doubt and Shero has been the best GM for many of his years with the Pens.
2008: Shero gets the best player at the deadline in Hossa plus Dupuis (Best GM)
2009: Shero gets Guerin, Kunitz, and Gill (Best GM)
2010: Shero trades for Poni but does not work out but Caputi turns out a dud also
2011: Shero trades Gogo for Neal and Niskanen (Best GM move also of year)
2012: Shero stands pat because market sucks better GM's
2013: Shero gets Iggy, Morrow, Murray, Jokinen for no NHL players (Best GM)
Track record is pretty dang good in my book. Shero has always went after the top free agents both at the deadline and in the Summer. I love that the Pens are always in the mix for the best guys. Also Shero has not sold the farm to compete for Cups because we have the best prospect depth we have had in years in my opinion. I remember in the 90's when it seemed like we never had any decent prospects in the system and ours is pretty nice considering the picks and prospects traded to go for Cups each year. With Despres, Pouliot, Maatta, Harrington, and Dumoulin that is a pretty good group of young dmen and we have others with potential also below them.
Shero's trades have been amazing and almost all proven winners. The best way to look at it is put them all as one and see what we got compared to gave up and it is not even close (Hossa, Iggy, Neal, Dupuis, Roberts, Guerin, Kunitz, Gill, Murray, Morrow, Ponikarovsky, Niskanen, Sutter, Dumoulin, Pouliot, Jokinen, and some picks for Staal, Armstrong, Whitney, Eric Christenson, Goligoski, J. Morrow, and some bust prospects and picks including some late 1st round picks). Shero has done a great job over the years and even with giving up many picks he has built a pretty decent prospect pool which is hard to do when trading for top players at the deadline each year. Some of you have a warped image of what Shero has done for this organization. No GM is perfect but I would not trade Shero for any GM.
He is a deserving candidate for this award, and he laid the groundwork for it with the Staal trade, which was a huge win for the Pens given the situation. And I bet the Paul Martin saga was something a lot of these writers considered as well. 
