I’m as critical of this forum as anyone, but some things are clearly evident at the time. I believe success in hockey is far more random than people tend to acknowledge — this is why I don’t find myself getting outraged like others do — but it also means the name of the game is to maximize your probability to hit over enough events (draft picks, trades, etc). We have years and years of history indicating what kinds of decisions are probability-maximizing vs probability-minimizing.
You don’t have to claim with certainty that “this player will succeed and this player will fail” to make the point that “this was the wrong decision because the odds of it working are lower than the odds of foregone decision”. This is the frustration I have as someone who generally gives managers a lot of rope because I understand that the “best process” can often fail, and the “worst process” may sometimes succeed by no factors related to the skill of the decision makers.