I waited to comment on all of this after the doomerist nonsense died down. There's nothing more that I hate than that. We're still going to be a great team next year. Have these folks already forgotten about the Hamilton offseason or, in the context of another team, Boston's offseason last year? Anyone who follows this team with any sort of depth knows that they purposefully do creative destruction every offseason, often involving very good players getting larger contracts elsewhere, but they never touch the core of the team. I'm not going to listen too deeply to the Elliotte Friedman stuff because there's too many moving parts to truly figure out how they're going to maintain team depth (On top of the Necas stuff being contrary to how the FO usually does business, I also think that Pesce is an underrated retainment candidate), but we should be confident that this is a front office group that knows how to do that very well.
Finally, I need to say that the panicking in some online corners also needs to stop about our team "not being good enough". Nonsense. Do people see how long it took the MacKinnon/Rantanen/Landeskog/Makar group to win a Cup? How about Ovechkin's Capitals? How about the damn Lightning? These were all slow burns. The Penguins/Blackhawks path to quick playoff success is what is rare. Most Cup-winning groups look more like us slogging around every postseason.