When can criticism be levied at MacLellan?
Last offseason was a disaster (Pacioretty and Edmundson? Not cashing in on a clearly declining Tom Wilson????). The Connor Brown trade was silly even removing the ACL injury. Darcy Kuemper is missing an eyeball. They wasted a first round pick acquiring Mantha. His drafts have largely been misses. He made Todd Reirden the head coach.
Yeah there are good moves too. I don't know if he should be fired or not. But let's not pretend a dude whose team hasn't been competitive in years is one of the best in the biz.
wut. This is you judging out comes and not process. They were a cap strapped team, with little to not options to improve.
They rolled the dice on Pacioretty, it didn't work out but it was the least investment for the biggest return they could make last offseason.
For Edmundson, they traded a 3rd and a 7th for a minutes eater that they got a 3rd and a 5th back for, hating on that is ridiculous when they had 3 young players at LD.
Connor Brown was not silly, he was a consistent 40 point guy with incredible underlying numbers who got hurt in his first shift. For someone who loves to talk about advanced stats, Brown was exactly the kind of middle sixer you should want them to target.
Keumper was fine, to good, his first year here on an absolutely awful and gutted team. Him having a bad year this year doesn't suddenly make his entire tenure trash.
I hated the Mantha trade from day one, and am all aboard criticizing that move, but do it logically. A large part of that premium was dropping Panik due to the global pandemic screwing with the salary cap. Literally no team was prepared for those implications. On top of that he got a 2nd and a 4th back for a guy who started eating healthy scratches when it counted most.
Reirden was the heir apparent to Ted and company basically as soon as GMBM was hired. That whole coaching search was ran by Ted and Dick, and Todd was forced on Trotz cause they wanted him. And acting like moving on from Trotz was a bad move compeltely ignores how trash he was for most of that year. So, once again we're only looking at outcomes instead of what actually happened.
And I won't even get into the Tom Wilson stuff, you can grind that axe somewhere else. It's based in your emotional feelings around Tom more then anything else.
Acquire talent that does just that.
What Talent! Do you think there's just some magic wand they can wave to create these guys out of thin air?
If you don't want to get push back you have to live in the real world with expectations and wants.