Why did he load up on slow 4th liners at the deadline?
Everyone knew our need was help for the top6 at the deadline, but MB mentally always been; character > skill. He values also depth a lot, he repeatedly explains after his transactions by "you never have enough depth". He seems very bias in over-evaluating the type of player he actually was; boring defensive defenseman, 3rd pairing, character guy, doing the safe plays, with no offensive upside.
He is good at finding solid depth guys with character/responsible defensively in bargain deals that can contribute in the bottom of your lineup; Byron, Danault, Benn, Mitchell, Weise, ...
But, he is
very bad at evaluating skill/talent though;
- The first skilled player he signed was Briere, which was a big failure, it was pretty obvious to everyone that he was already done has a top6 player in the NHL.
- He then traded Briere for Parenteau, who didn't help our top6 either, you could argued that there was somewhat of a small upgrade, but Parenteau cost .5M more with 1 extra year, which meant we ended up buying out the extra year. Another fail.
- He gave a 3.5M/4y contract extension to Desharnais when they were no need to commit for that kind of term, even more so for that amount of money. Desharnais had amplified stats because he somehow managed to be in the 1C position, but even at that point it was pretty easy to see his limited offensive ability and possible contribution. They are obvious big red flags when a player starts aging considering his size and speed.
- He signed Gilbert who was supposed to have some offensive upside to his game and help our 2nd PP, Gilbert did 12P in 72G and 2P in 45G (the drop is due to the fact that we add to remove him from the PP, since he didn't belong there whatsoever).
- He then sign Semin, another player who was the shadow of who he once was offensively. Definitely a fail.
- Minor move, he traded some skill in Andrighetto for physicality in Martinsen. Didn't work out in our favor.
- Since he is here we also increase the amount of grinder/character type player drafted over skilled players, none of those type of picks seem to be working out.
- He signed Radulov though which is obviously a great signing. I think most teams would have wanted Radulov on that deal. I would attribute this signing more to luck over giving MB credits, since Radulov simply wanted to come play in a hockey city like MTL (liked his time in the QMJHL). In fact, Radulov refused bigger deals from other teams. Even though it turns out in our favors, MB should have been ready to give more money/term over taking the risk on missing on Radulov in my opinion. I don't know what is plan B was... missing on Radulov would have been a big blow to MTL.
- Finally he traded Subban for Weber, since in his logic character/leadership > raw talent. The consensus is telling me that we didn't won that deal.
