You're right that anonymous posters have no real accountability, which has led to you feeling free to misrepresent my statements. If you'd actually read my statements, you'd know that "back to the clown show it is I guess" was more a statement against MLSE and Shanahan than Treliving. As I said at the time... "From the sounds of how this went down, MLSE stalled, they decided they wanted Dubas back, Dubas wanted to come back, and then Shanny started making bad decisions on emotion, and now we're in a huge mess at a critical time and have no plan. We're going back to the clown show era." For decades, this franchise made stupid, reactionary, short-sighted, and counterproductive moves. The clown show era. Then Shanahan came in, and things stabilized a bit. Then Dubas became GM, and we finally had a competent GM making logical, well-reasoned moves with a good balance between present and future, and we had some of the best Leaf teams in modern history through some of the most difficult situations in modern history. Shanahan wanted him back. He wanted to come back. And then Shanahan had a bad dream one day, and everything started falling apart. And then we made a quick nepotism hire from the old boys club. That was massively, massively concerning, and very reminiscent of the era we'd finally escaped.
But I gave Treliving a chance. I liked that he didn't make a rash move of the core, and liked the Holmberg re-signing. I liked that he got Matthews re-signed and defended the term and cap hit he was given. I liked some of the prospect re-signings and the deep depth signings were fine. Then he paid a lot for Kampf, and I was concerned, but he had been a good player for us and I trusted that he had a plan for how that would fit in. And then his first real move was overpaying a sub-replacement player in his late 30s for 3 years... Not great... And then he overpaid one of the worst defensive defensemen in the league, who had been breaking down for the past couple years... Also not great... I didn't really see the fit for him in the existing team, but surely Treliving was well-informed on his status, and had a bigger plan for the defense and would insulate him... And then he didn't do anything else there... And then we took our goalie to arbitration... And then he signed two more forwards that are quite bad defensively to fit into the middle six. Which created a problematic scenario, because we'd just invested a lot of money into Kampf, and then gave him nowhere to play and nobody to play with. We took away from our defensive and PK strengths and didn't really improve anywhere. And then we traded away quality depth that was one of the last remaining players Kampf could have played effectively with. And we didn't get Nylander signed...
But I still gave Treliving the benefit of the doubt and waited to see how things played out as the games got underway. And then pretty much every concern and prediction played out exactly as expected. We didn't have configurations that worked in the forward or defensive groups. Reaves was a complete disaster, and one of the worst players I've seen in my life. Klingberg was a disaster and got walked every game. Bertuzzi and Domi didn't really seem to fit anywhere or mesh with anyone, at least until Robertson came along for Domi. Our 4th line was unplayable. We picked up some gimmick points in OT and SO, but our underlying metrics tanked. We were bad defensively. We were bad on the PK. We were getting outplayed most games.
I haven't had "100+ posts in the thread uniformly criticizing Treliving", but if all that doesn't represent a good time to waive a red flag on certain decisions, I'm not sure when you think is. I still hope that he can turn things around, but this start for him has largely been a disaster. Mind-bogglingly, in response to honest, proper evaluations of him and his decisions, we have people adamantly defending objectively bad moves and blaming everything on a GM that isn't even here anymore, who left Treliving a golden situation and opportunity, and all of the players actually doing good things.
