Oh good. The chicken littles are out in force.
Some people on these boards seem to be genuine masochists, so obsessed with sticking with their old takes that they want things to go badly. We have one of the best young centers in the league, "I hope he goes somewhere else bcuz were bad lol". So...go be a fan of another team then. If an Oiler fan said this I wouldn't bat an eye. You're not a Canucks fan.
Look, the truth is that the rebuild sputtered for a couple of years and Benning completely misread the league. The 2016 world cup was a zeitgeist shift, the speed and skill ramped up exponentially with the success of the young North American team with McDavid, Matthews, etc. Benning misread this, he signed Eriksson, Gudbranson, traded for Sutter. It was bad.
So then, he brought in some vets to just hold the line psychologically. Beagle would have been okayish at 3 years and 2.5, I liked the Roussel deal and think it would have been fine if he hadn't had his knee obliterated.
Gagner and Del Zotta were rubbish signings. But this was all just to maintain some sort of veteran accountability. You can't just 'let the kids play' or you end up with a toxic culture of entitlement like Buffalo or Edmonton have had for the last decade.
Then, suddenly, we hit on some picks and the rebuild was over before it was supposed to be (not from the perspective one would have had in 2014 of course, but the perspective that one would have had in 2017 in May).
So then we felt an impetus to do something while Petey and Hughes were on entry level deals, but it wasn't technically our window and it still isn't. Our real window starts in 2 years. I hope we are successful before then, but the detritus contracts, the Spooner buy-out, the punitive Luongo bullshit all is over by then.
Letting Markstrom and Tanev go was a difficult decision but it was the right one for financial/age reasons.
But it cut a huge swath through our dressing room. Suddenly the kids are being leaned on.
Hughes is a small, offensive defence man. He's really really good defensively all things considered (given his size, and offensive pedigree), but he's still a young kid trying to defend against the best and biggest forwards in the league. Guess what suddenly he's our number 1 Dman. And not just in terms of play, like the expectation is that he has to be one of our top 3 players every night, while shutting down the other team's best players, or we won't win.
A lot of people on these boards have never played hockey at any competitive level. They tell themselves that it doesn't matter in terms of the quality of their takes, but it does. A hockey team is different than a basketball team, you are as good as your capabilities versus the position you are slotted into. If Hughes was on Colorado or Tampa, there would be no slump.
This is true for Petey too, it's one thing to be a slick player that other teams haven't seen before, hidden on a bad team that nobody gets up for. It's different when you're the superstar forward on a team that fired a shot over the bows of the rest of the teams last playoffs. A team that has lost depth, lost leadership, lost identity.
What a lot of people don't seem to really realize, is that NHL teams values range from 1.7 Billion or so, to about 350 million.
This means that if you are an established star on a team, there are 30 other giant corporations that are using all of their resources to figure out how to shut you down. They have some of the best 700 people at this sport on the planet, they have video guys analyzing frame by frame looking for tendencies, they have analytics guys looking for patterns, trying to find an edge.
These are kids. 21 and 22. It's a lot to take on and there will be hiccups. It's okay, they'll figure it out.
It's possible that this year will be a lost one, I still won't be worried about our overall outlook. Our window opens in earnest in 22-23.
