Sure, I never said we are a contending team. Lindholm is the best player on at least 10 teams though. Agreed on your assessment on Backlund too.
I've been advocating for a rebuild since Johnny left honestly. With him and Tkachuk there was a chance if a goalie got hot or something. Without them we're a 6-10th place team every year.
Last summer really killed out opportunity at a rebuild. Last thing we need to do is go the rebuild route, get some good young guys, and then have our next contending window ruined by the end years of Kadri/Huberdeau contracts. But ideally we really should have tried to get some blue chip futures for Tkachuk.
I think we're almost forced to try and compete in the next few years, and then we can bottom out during those cap killing years.
But I don't disagree with you. Last year we were a really good team, but our problem was we didn't have enough elite guys. So when the elite guy you have leaves the team for nothing, it's really tough to replace that. The trade made was almost the perfect deal possible to compete now, but yeah, Huberdeau was never going to be as good as or replace Gaudreau, and Kadri isn't nearly a Tkachuk.
The best we can do at this point is hope some of the young guys bust out way better than expected, Huberdeau/Kadri bounce back and we can make a run out of team depth and hot goaltending (like Seattle this year basically).
