Our troubles are NOT because of Seguin. Yeah, it hurts. But we won the President's trophy last year without him, while he was a PPG player in Dallas. Seguin is one of the top players in the league, will be for another 10 years, but we had 4 quality lines last year. Eriksson and Soderberg were on our 3rd line, we were so deep offensively. Then this year rolled along.
We got rid of Iginla and replaced him with no one. Oh, check that, Simon Gagne. Chara is regressing, and we helped that move along by trading Boychuk for picks, all the while knowing that Seidenberg wasn't going to be as good as he was years past due to his injury. We're banking on Seth Griffith and Craig Cunningham to come in and replace a first ballot hall of famer.
The Seguin trade sucked and it will continue to do so, but Smith and Eriksson are two key contributors on this team. It could have been a looooooooot worse. Chiarelli has single handedly destroyed this team's window by making stupid decisions like he did this offseason.
Chiarelli went all in last year, hoping that the cap would go up 4m, 5m, maybe 25 million, we would end up fine, and would get a Cup out of it. It didn't work, and now our team is suffering because of it. He gave NMCs to players like Kelly, and we had to trade Boychuk instead of him for it. Since we've been a playoff team for so long we don't have a ton of top-end talent in our system, Pastrnak is the only real player there with real 1st line potential. Svedberg and Subban are solid but we have Rask. Claude hates Spooner, who has great potential, because he's far too stubborn and does not accept players who do not fit his system like a glove. It's why Gregory Campbell is out there with 2 minutes left in a game where we're down by one. It's hard to admit, but unless Chiarelli and Claude change it real soon, this team's window is done and we might as well start a rebuild/retool while guys like Bergeron/Krejci/Rask are young and Hamilton has time to grow.
Kind of went off on a tangent, but tl;dr: this team's woes aren't because of the Seguin trade. It sucked, will continue to suck, but Smith and Eriksson are two important players on our team. Morrow is one of our few prospects with solid NHL potential. Chiarelli's idiotic moves like his NMCs, risky contracts, and stupid trades are what is causing this team to struggle and why our window will be shut if he doesn't do something about it soon.