Bottom line: You can fault Shero's decisions however you want. But I think there needs to be some accounting for the fact that trades and other such roster moves cannot and do not happen in a vacuum, no matter what ill-informed yahoos on a messageboard type. And as such, we should consider that more often when discussing moves, otherwise, the discussion is more deeply flawed than it already is.
The article talks about the organizational depth of the Penguins forcing Shero's hand. While I can understand Shero's moves at the time they were being made, those of us who said, many times, that this was what was going to happen with particularly our D-men because of the pipeline overflowing whereas other areas were shallow, should be allowed to say 'told you so'.
We have had a system where we've been developing NHL players out of non-premiere talents from Wilkes Barre who fit the third pairing D and bottom 6 forwards categories. That should have been a strength. It is not an easy thing to do.
When you have a sufficient number of those who the staff deems ready, you should play them and develop them as cheap assets rather than go out and pick up veterans. Richard Park is a good example. He did well for us, mind, but it was an asset picked up for free who would of course yield nothing when we were done with him, and in the mean time he would make it impossible to develop one of our own.
We've known for more than a year that we had NHL ready talent in Strait and Bortuzzo. I have never been one of the many here who slated Lovejoy, and indeed I would be OK with him as a permanent 6th D-man, but obviously not so if we have guys who are better than him. Or at least then those guys should be traded for real value if we want to keep Lovejoy. That's the only issue. Now we see a guy we gave up for a 5th play 18+ minutes a night for the number 2 team in the league. A guy we gave up for nothing plays 20 with the Isles. The reason their values were that low was that we had ourselves created the situation in which they looked tangential NHL'ers.
Tangradi Vitale N. Johnson
This is a better 4th line than what we presently have. IMO. We could have played that from the start of last season, developing our assets to the point that they could move upwards in the lineup or actually be worth something with any one of them rotating with Adams who we would have no doubt kept anyway. But we re-signed Asham and added Park as UFA's, and in the playoffs we scratched the best of the bunch in Vitale, which for... whatever.... reason we have done even this season also.
I totally disagree(d) with this policy to start a regular season when we had the in-house options we did. If you need to add experience to a 4th line in that situation, that's what the deadline is for, but we have stacked the bottom 6 from day 1 for years now, and outside of genuinely elite talent, you just don't develop your prospects in the top6 from day 1.
So, in conclusion, I think the article is worthwhile reading, and the sunken cost argument is fair enough. But it does NOTHING to suggest that we have not shot ourselves in the foot asset management wise in the past years that led up to this predictable situation. And I say predictable, because many here did just that. Predict it. Yahoos or not.