Or, people can have different opinions and that's what boards like this are for. There's some whining, but I see plenty of decent discussion here, and it ain't from posts like this just vomiting out strawmen and appeals to authority.
It's these kind of posts that had me go from a regular poster, to a lurker, to not coming here as much to discuss. I've been on these boards a long time before posts counts were started when HF used to actually rate prospects and did team ranking of prospects. I also posted more on the ESPN boards which only had a handful of posters. I only see, at least when I come to read, very few outlandish claims like trading for Bedard, but when someone is negative about an aspect of the team, the position of authority argument is often used. I'm glad to see that this has gotten much better lately, and I hope that it continues that way.
On to the offseason discussion, I have my doubts that Barry is going to sway too far from the Poile way of doing things, and that is quite unfortunate for it has kept us, with very few exceptions, a mediocre team. Poile's strategy, which unfortunately wasn't extremely successful, was to build from the net out. Now during expansion when we had a very limited budget, I could see that strategy being fairly necessary to try to win hockey games and grow the sport in our area. Unfortunately, it has led us to adopting that way of building a team since its inception. We heavily rely on Vezina quality goaltending to just compete to get into the playoffs which unfortunately seems to be the mail goal of the ownership group. We seem to always be in neutral when it comes to decision making on direction of the team. We have never fully embraced a rebuild due to this; how many times did we hear a rebuild turn into a "partial rebuild", "retool", or competitive rebuild. Now with this said, it's going to be a hard sell to rebuild if you've just signed your Vezina quality goaltender to a multi-year a 62 million dollar contract. Also you still have very talented pieces. My hope, since in my opinion a full rebuild isn't in the cards, is that we go all in for 3 years being we have Josi and our corp signed for 3-5 more years then look to rebuild. My hope it that we go after a few of the big named free agents at forward and D. Id love Stammer and a Teravainen type of signing on the front end with a Dman like Zadarov on the back end. Hopefully, we don't see Zucker, or any of our other free agents near this team. Fill in the holes with youth and go from there.