I absolutely believed they'd be better than Detroit.
But I was still way, way off because I thought they'd be a bubble team at best. At best. So while I love to give
@The Zetterberg Era a hard time, my prediction wasn't all that accurate and likely attributed to luck.
I call a lot of shots, I'm bound to hit a handful. I forget most of the ones I got wrong... Most
... (Mrazek franchise goalie, lock him up to 7 years)
.
I think mine are Tvrdon and Smith, I believed in them a lot. I also thought Ouellet could make better skating gains and ultimately he never could. Post here long enough and you have a lot of those moments...
I have always said I didn't expect Karlsson, Theodore and Schmidt to have that kind of impact. I even really liked Theodore, Schmidt and Miller while agreeing they had a better D-core than the Wings during that off-season. MAF wasn't a model of consistency, I liked him but didn't know if he could handle a huge work load, was actually surprised they didn't get better backup options in the expansion draft too. But I kept looking at their centers and thinking they were going to get caved in. Heck we played them early and that was exactly what we did, was just crushed them down the middle of the ice. Gallant tweaked some things and Karlsson stepped up massively.
It was a breathtaking run though to be sure. I really was just happy to see the reaction of the market as somebody that argued massively in favor of Vegas on the business board. I love the head start they have on the Raiders. I think Vegas is going to be a lot like Nashville and San Jose in terms of this is an ideal market that has lots of dollars and people to support the product. Solid sunshine expansion teams, the ones Canadian media types never want to discuss.
I think Seattle is going to be tougher with all the sporting options. But I think hockey can be successful there. I just think they are going to have to work at it harder, but as a USA Hockey fan getting a team in the Pacific Northwest is incredibly important in my opinion. They had been close with Pittsburgh moving to Portland, but Lemieux saved the day. Still it is an under-served part of the country and has junior infrastructure there already in the WHL. I hope it is successful, I don't think they are going to get the same amount of luck as Vegas and I think teams will have adjusted to the way GMGM exploited them to various degrees. The league wanted the expansion team to be more competitive than previous iterations too, I think that will remain for Seattle, I just think more teams will swallow hard and say alright take whatever you want out of what I didn't protect. Most of the teams that threw multiple assets (think Wild and Ducks in a massive way) got burned. I will say while Florida is usually listed here, they are back pushing towards the cap and didn't want Smith at all anymore. It hasn't been their top 6 that is failing them, those were salary and roster component switches. They should have got more value in my opinion but I don't think it burned them nearly as bad as what happened to Minnesota and Anaheim.