Fine-tuning is last, and arguably the most critical part to winning a Stanley Cup. Coincidentally, it was the aspect of GMing that Doug Wilson was horrible at.
Curious what you (or anyone else) would have done differently with the Sharks once they had the core guys of Thornton, Marleau, Cheechoo, and Vlasic in place. Even add Couture and Pavelski in there if you want that came later. In my mind, the problem was that the team wasn't done being built at that point and it wasn't ready to be fine tuned. They had built one very good line, but the second line was not nearly good enough and the defense still needed a lot more help.
I doubt many will agree with me, but I think they needed to continue to try to add draft picks to build out the rest of the team. Instead, they kept acting like a team that was 1-2 players away when it was more like at least 4-6 players away. Guys like Ryan Clowe, Nils Ekman, etc. deserved to be on third lines, not second and first lines. I'd have been perpetually looking to trade every third forward that got paired with Thornton after his stats got inflated to make him look better than he was to build out either enough draft capital to get the 2-3 more forwards and 2-3 more higher end defensemen we needed via draft or trade.
Setoguchi not working out better obviously didn't help, but I don't know if I blame a GM for not being ahead of the game on that score. They never should have expected Cheechoo's one great season was going to last though, injury or not.
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