I wanted to try to give it some time, but if in fact a trade is not coming I would grade this off-season pretty poorly.
After not seeing our name mentioned with the likes of Roy, Pesce, or Skjei... the logical conclusion to me was oh, we are not pursuing this because we have a trade in the hopper that is a better fit.
OK, cool.
If we did not land any of the guys above, and have no trades coming, that is bad.
(If all their eggs were in the Trouba basket and they had no Plan B, that is still bad).
I would have deemed it essential to bring in at least one proven top 4 defenseman. It was pretty obvious Seider was in over his head with the touch matchups last year, a guy like Pesce or Roy would have been a tremendous help in distributing those minutes better. And then the additional benefit is you find a good partner for Edvinsson as well. So really a 2:1 there in terms of the importance of bringing in a quality middle pairing guy.
I think not making that happen is going to be a significant issue for us.
The only possible silver lining is they run Edvinsson on the top pair with Seider from the jump and he grabs the opportunity, or they run Chiarot-Johansson on the middle pair and somehow that is just a combo that works well. But I am skeptical they will give those young guys that big of a chance from the get-go. You will probably see something like Chiarot-Seider on the top pair and Edvinsson-Petry on the middle pair, or shit like that.