To be fair to Trotz, he was put into a position where he was pretty much guaranteed to fail. No prior management experience and like Linden being given too big a job right away on an aging team that has never really done a rebuild in its history. He was basically given the job because of his relationship with Poile. He needed at least another year to learn the management side of the job. The biggest being learning the cap and that you can’t just spend a bunch of money on players you wanted to coach.
Well Trotz was inexperienced yes but Poile is still available to pick his brain and he has an experienced AGM in Kealty. As for learning the cap, I don't think there's that much to learn. He should know by now that there is a cap and that needs to be managed. The intricacies can be turned over to someone else. As a coach he might favour his veteran players but he should know that players do age and can rapidly decline and in the long run he needs young players.
At least with Trotz learning on the job is somewhat justified as Benning had years of AGM experience, while this is Trotz’s first management experience. That teams even hire managers with no experience is crazy though. This doesn’t really happen in the real world. Starbucks Managers were Assistant Managers first.
Other GMs should have Trotz on speed dial
There's different types of experience though. In the real work there's experience managing companies, industry experience, and company experience. Former agents, players, coaches etc. all have industry experience and or company experience. At least head coaches are closer to being involved in hockey operations than former agents and players. In hockey, it's kind of rare for a head coach to take on GM duties without being a head coach at the same time. Although I guess technically Trotz went from Senior Advisor to GM. I am surprised that Kealty didn't get the GM job and is still there.