Elias Pettersson has a 100-point season with big Selke recognition and Quinn Hughes plays like a top-5 defender in the sport but our #1 goalie gets hurt and we have bad crappy PK guys ... and the results are somehow the core's fault?
How on earth could anyone thinking rationally come to that conclusion?
And they did do a full rebuild from 2015-2019, albeit accidentally.
i think the premise of what's actually being discussed can be boiled down to; how many players form a core?
if it's a 1c, 1d, 1g - no question, the canucks are in a terrific spot for these three positions. but this is not the nba, and star top of the roster players just don't have that much impact relative to other sports.
if it's a 1c, 1w, 2c, 1d, 2d, 1g - well now we're maybe middle of the pack, and this is probably consistent with where the team should expect to finish
if it's a 1c, 1w, 2c, 2w, 3c, 3w, 1d, 2d, 3d, 1g and 2g ... that's where the questions start to arise.
_____________
the direction vs execution vs process framing mentioned earlier is correct.
i don't think you're wrong on direction. but the continual bedard stuff, months after the draft lottery, is a strawman at this point dude. you're arguing against an imaginary y2k - it's as lazy as bringing up gaborik and cammalleri as a dismissive dunk when the sedins were winning art rosses. let's move past that, please.
execution - we agree, it's up in the air, and can only be characterized using a "wait and see" approach. if the team makes the playoffs and wins a round or three, they are probably on a great track to success. if they miss the playoffs by 10 points despite all of these moves, they probably are not.
process - here's where i feel i keep losing you. there are only so many chips a team has. war chest, dry powder, assets, whatever. the league automatically replenishes every team via the draft each year. i'm not saying we sit on the sidelines and continue to hoard chips hoping for a magical day where everything goes on sale and we're the only ones buying. but there's a pace to these things. assets aren't just considered in absolute terms - time is a factor. you can either blow $10k at the bar in one night and be the biggest baller out on the town or you can spend $10k buying three happy hours drink a night for a year.
you keep saying the thing about how this is real life with jobs on the line, etc. i agree with that wholeheartedly. but let me offer an illustration using a recent quote from jim pattison on becoming a billionaire:
"Look, if you want to be a millionaire, be prudent. Become excellent at something, make a healthy income, live within your means, invest the surplus. It's a different formula if you want to be a billionaire. You've got to take risks."
if we think about making the playoffs as being a millionaire and winning a cup as a billionaire - the canucks process holds to some extent, in that they have been aggressive and decisive over the last 6-8 months (horvat trade, hronek trade, oel buyout). as we agree on for execution - either these things will work out, or they won't.
but i think there's a caveat for both pattison's quote and the canucks situation - in real life you need a safety net in case those risks don't pan out - as in, you have to be a millionaire (or at least have access to many of them) before the risks you take lead you to the path of a billionaire. for the canucks, i think the takeaway is that you need to be a playoff team
before you start making aggressive moves to become a contender.
it's the timing of the execution which comes back to process. i've said i wouldn't have bought out oel and i would've kept the hronek picks rather than cashing them in. i was fine with keeping boeser but that was clearly wrong as you and others argued, but i incorrectly thought it made sense because moving him at what was then a perceived all-time low value felt inprudent. you have mentioned feeling the same way about keeping garland rather than moving him for a second or whatever.
you might be right that getting rid of oel and bringing in soucy and cole is an accretive, worth-more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts culture change on defense that gets the team to that "millionaire" status right away, which is potentially the first step to the billionaire path. my question is still - what are the other levers/risks that the group can take from here to improve? i'm not convinced that we can take an incrementalist approach - ie. fixing the pk, picking a cohesive coaching team, etc. - to go from millionaire to billionaire. actually, those are the levers we've used just to get here. you're also right that the 1c/1d/1g are already performing at a very high level - can we reasonably expect more improvement from them? if not... then we need improvement from other positions, like 1w, 2w, 2d, 3d. how does that happen?
i think now (or once we actually make the playoffs) is when we need a bunch of big risky boom or bust moves - but we've exhausted our assets for the most part. if this season goes right, our chances of improving ride on either miraculous internal progressions, or hoping that we can land major assets at deadlines using prospects like lekkerimaki or our yearly mid-20s first rounders.
like in some ways, i think the process you're advocating for long-term is just betting on/hoping for a different set of magic beans. imo, to be a cup contending team, we need hronek to basically be devon toews, or hirose to be the next chris tanev, or podkolzin to be nichushkin, or garland/hoglander to be a prime brendan gallagher, or willander to be dan hamhuis... or some combination of a couple of those, all while none of petey/hughes/miller/demko/kuzmenko take a step back, let alone an uncharacteristic drop off like demko's last season or petey's first half of 21-22.
to me, that pathway to being a billionaire feels more unlikely than if we had traded miller for whatever nyr combination of assets (effectively also clearing the cap space to add soucy and cole, which i would still do), kept the hronek pick on top of drafting willander and taken benson or wood, kept oel in the hopes that he ltir's himself in a year... essentially leading to potentially delaying the "millionaire" achievement by a year, but with a much deeper war chest to get to bllionaire status from there. now does that mean petey demands out for sure? who knows - he clearly isn't convinced enough by what did transpire to stay, and if all this still leads to not making the playoffs, he might be done. in my timeline, maybe you can convince him to take a one-year before demanding out because the team is one year away. or maybe he demands out this past summer. who knows.
________
point is - i think this process discussion is fascinating, and constant strawmen back to people who were wide eyed about a local generational talent being available in the draft takes away from that. your favored path, which the team seems to be following, absolutely could pan out. i think the one i was advocating for could have worked, too, but it's just hypothetical now. we'll see if they fall short and if it looks like they need at least one or two more core pieces. my gut is that they do.
