The biggest issue I have with the stuff surrounding the retool is that people compress the timeline. Look at the 19-20 season: Backstrom Oshie Ovechkin were 32 33 34, and we had Vrana Wilson Kuznetsov at 23 25 27. That's a robust top 6 at that time, as evidenced by the fact that they were 2nd in goals in the league that year. You move to the next year, 20-21, and the Caps were 3rd in goals again, with the coaching change from Reirden to Laviolette. They move Vrana for Mantha, so trade 24 for 26, but again the old guard were the top 3 scorers, Backstrom, Oshie and Ovechkin in that 56 game season. The pipeline then was a little bare, but when your top line is still producing at 33-35, and your 2nd line is 26 26 and 28, you'd think you have a couple years left of runway.
However, you also had the disruption of the pandemic, but what it also did was preclude any sort of cap growth. So the Caps lacked any sort of internal high-end forward prospects, and the flat cap forced them to be dollar-in/dollar-out and not add any external solutions. I remember doing some CapFriendly stuff prior to the pandemic where they could have fit Taylor Hall as a UFA under the cap with a bit of massaging and the cap going up. Given his results since that year, it would have been a bust, but there's an extra top 6 guy that Mac's been looking for.
The draft side of things is a bit different. The drafts of 08-13 had a bunch of picks hit their ceilings, whereas the drafts of 14-19 had more of them only hit their floors. An example of this is taking Holtby/Grubauer in the 4th and getting 2 1a goalies, as opposed to taking Samsonov and Vanecek in the 1st/2nd and getting 2 1b goalies. Another example is Johansson, Wilson and Burakovsky ending up as full-time top 6, with Vrana, McMichael and Protas not having gotten to full-time (yet). You also have the one bust pick of Johansen, where if they had drafted DeBrincat instead, a bunch of complaints about BMac's drafting would be much more muted. From my study of their picks, the biggest trend they missed was small skill later in the draft, and even then there's just so few successes.
To use the Athletic's model from their draft rankings (Ranking the NHL’s best and worst drafting teams since 2007: 16-1), from 09-13 they were +32 wins above average drafting, and from 14-18 they were +6 (I'm ignoring the -5 from 2018 as too small a sample size for now). DeBrincat himself is already 14 wins, so that would cut the deficit by more than half. About the worst thing you can say with regards to the 14-18 drafts was they didn't take any swings at skill, and went too D/G heavy early rounds. Sometimes that's just the way your list goes.
However, you also had the disruption of the pandemic, but what it also did was preclude any sort of cap growth. So the Caps lacked any sort of internal high-end forward prospects, and the flat cap forced them to be dollar-in/dollar-out and not add any external solutions. I remember doing some CapFriendly stuff prior to the pandemic where they could have fit Taylor Hall as a UFA under the cap with a bit of massaging and the cap going up. Given his results since that year, it would have been a bust, but there's an extra top 6 guy that Mac's been looking for.
The draft side of things is a bit different. The drafts of 08-13 had a bunch of picks hit their ceilings, whereas the drafts of 14-19 had more of them only hit their floors. An example of this is taking Holtby/Grubauer in the 4th and getting 2 1a goalies, as opposed to taking Samsonov and Vanecek in the 1st/2nd and getting 2 1b goalies. Another example is Johansson, Wilson and Burakovsky ending up as full-time top 6, with Vrana, McMichael and Protas not having gotten to full-time (yet). You also have the one bust pick of Johansen, where if they had drafted DeBrincat instead, a bunch of complaints about BMac's drafting would be much more muted. From my study of their picks, the biggest trend they missed was small skill later in the draft, and even then there's just so few successes.
To use the Athletic's model from their draft rankings (Ranking the NHL’s best and worst drafting teams since 2007: 16-1), from 09-13 they were +32 wins above average drafting, and from 14-18 they were +6 (I'm ignoring the -5 from 2018 as too small a sample size for now). DeBrincat himself is already 14 wins, so that would cut the deficit by more than half. About the worst thing you can say with regards to the 14-18 drafts was they didn't take any swings at skill, and went too D/G heavy early rounds. Sometimes that's just the way your list goes.
