I was a big Kristo fan, he was a lot of fun to watch, and it's not like he sucked, he did put up 97 pts in 82 games in his final 2 years at ND. His line in his senior year with Knight and MacMillan was the top line in the NCAA that year, they dominated teams.
But when you give your opinion on over 30 prospects every year you are going to be wrong plenty. I thought Collberg was going to be a very good 2nd line winger for us along with Kristo, I badly wanted us to draft Higgins and Perezhogin, thought for sure they would be long time Habs. When Ryder got sent to the ECHL for the 2nd time I said he would never make the NHL. After watching Garon lose in the playoffs vs Hamilton I thought he was done and then after watching him in Hamilton with that stacked team I thought he was going to be a very good goalie. I like O'Byrne a lot and thought he would stick around longer then 300+ NHL games.
When I watched Pateryn and Bennett for 4 years at Michigan I never would have thought that Pateryn would be the NHLer and Bennett out of hockey. Bennett looked so much better while Pateryn lacked the skating, speed. I only saw say 4 or so games of Leblanc at Havard but if you had told me that Alex Killorn would end up being the better NHLer I wouldn't have believed it. (thought they were the top 3 scorers on the team so not that shocking)
I took a ton of heat when I started ranking Subban over McDonagh while he was still in the OHL. Ask
@Mrb1p how much crap he gave me over my dislike of Beaulieu, I mean just look at this thread as I have someone following me around trying to troll me because I openly admitted my hate of Lefebvre and how i thought he was the WORST coach I'd ever seen at the pro level. I couldn't stand the guy and I fully voiced my opinion and every year there would be a small handful of posters telling how wrong I was about him. They spun the wheel of excuses for him except when it came to trying to explain his poor decisions with his roster.
Now maybe I was wrong there, maybe it was less Lefebvre and MB fired the wrong guy and instead should have fired Timmins. I don't believe that simply because Timmins had a proven track record. Most posters seem to say he did a good job up until '08. Lefebvre had NEVER been a head coach before, not one game of experience. So he's had zero track record. Then you look at the moves he makes, his obsession with Maxime Macenauer, over Leblanc, and others. Putting no talent grinders on the PP. What a joke. Letting kids sit in the press box while guys like Joe Finley would get ice time, what a terrible way to develop and his record shows what a failure he was.
And I've said over and over and over that it's not just on him, management, MT/CJ, Timmins and his staff, the players, they all have a hand in this. But Lebefvre was at the top along with MB in who I wanted to see fired and replaced with someone better. If MB goes and the new GM wants to get rid of Timmins then so be it but imo he's much less at fault then Lefebvre and this management team for rushing these kids and poorly handling them.