I'm either misreading as I've been up since 3am or perplexed. I don't agree with many of the trades made by Botts or Murray for that matter. I stand in neither court. But did you just say you'd rather have
Myers
Armia
Rsolovic
Brendan was never gonna play here whatever
McNabb
over ROR
Kane
lehner?
yes I Get there was other pieces mentioned...mostly hypothetical because we didn't draft them...could very well be adding eric conrell x3 to that list if we were drafting. Yes I'd take the 3 bonafied NHler players vs Grigorenko and a grab bag of meh.
Lets face facts none of these deals actually put us behind. I'll support Compher because I think hes a player and will give you that. Zads will be unprotected in the expansion draft and hasn't taken the step forward worthy of batting an eye at yet. Move the hell on. We gave up nothing and got basically nothing without expanding the ROR trade.
Well there is a LOT more to the list than what you typed. I'm arguing that the overall work of Murray was a massive net negative, mostly because he wasted draft picks which would have ended up being free, young, cheap (for a couple years anyway) impact players. A little less because of overpaying for the wrong types of players/people to lead the team in those trades.
I get your point about drafting 3 Cornel's, but only an idiot passes on White/Boeser/Konecny with #21, which Murray probably would've proven by selecting Samsonov. Roslovic was likely anyone's pick at #25, and Aho fell into the 2nd rd, making him a very reasonable pick at #31. But yes, it's not certain who Buffalo would have taken. It is certain that a good GM coming into a re-build with draft capital should use that to build a young and talented team, the old-fashioned way, especially when that draft class is the best in over a decade. Saying that Murray may have drafted poorly doesn't defend his logic to trade away those picks in a great draft pool.
Wasting those picks, and wasting the depth players and prospects (as mediocre as some were) for Kane, Bogosian, Lehner, is not defensible, and it landed the franchise in a worse position than when the tear down finished. The O'Reilly trade is defensible, if Aho would've been stupidly passed on anyway, or if the team was competitive enough with the other picks and depth retained to where ROR was still happy and motivated to stay. I still believe that using all the draft picks that year was by far the better option.
The continued blaming of Botterill (or whoever your preferred GM candidate was) for somehow not turning the crater left behind into a playoff team with a healthy farm club, in just three years, simply isn't reasonable.