This is exactly what I hate here, people mostly talk about the negative. I did say he wasn't a good GM overall. You still gotta give credit where credit is due. He did draft those guys, no one else did. He did turn Galchenyuk into Anderson. He did sign Toffoli and he did brought us to the cup. No one else did that for a while and that's something. Never said he was the greatest, but I did appreciate a lot the finals run and it was under Bergevin.
Also, stop acting like he could've signed superstars, there's litteraly no one who wants to come here. We have to develop our own stars. Yes he and Timmins did pick like shit for most of his tenure, but I'm pretty sure Molson didn't want him to rebuild like HuGo is doing right now.
Brother, I have all the patience in the world to argue (especially while I'm on client-time) but there is no benefit to either of us to string this charade along. Bergevin does not need you to defend his legacy because he's gone now so his legacy can speak for itself.
If we establish a baseline level of results we should have expected, then any reasonable person would say Bergevin fell below that level overall.
So I don't see any benefit to giving credit for signing Tyler Toffoli because literally every team signs UFAs, so there is nothing noteworthy about a handful of successful mid-tier signings over the span of ten years. Yes Toffoli, Eddy, Chiarot were all good acquisitions, but Armstrong, Bouillon, Parros, Alzner, Streit, Hemsky, all those bad backup goalies, and a bunch of others were not good or impressive and didn't help the Habs at all... so in the end you'd see more negative than positive on the FA front. Net bad.
The Habs made the Cup Finals (and got pummelled in the finals, don't forget) but they didn't win a single playoff round in the preceding five years and following the Cup finals they had the worst season in Habs history. Is that a net positive or net negative for you?
I did not say anything about 'signing superstars' but he didn't develop any either. Ten years, not one PPG player. Some teams have 2+ PPG players per season, we didn't have a single PPG player in TEN years. He turned a 3OA into Galchenyuk into Domi into Josh Anderson the 30-40pt player. 9OA to Sergachev to J. Drouin the 40pt winger who's always injured. He turned another 3OA into Kotkaniemi into a mid-to-low 1st round pick, and gave up another 1st round pick to acquire 40-45pt Dvorak.
Therrien and then Julien as head coach. Lefebvre in the AHL for over half a decade...
And so on.
IMO you should let some fans rant about Bergevin... he does not need anybody to defend his legacy. His tenure is an unambiguous Loss and unambiguous negative and it's thankfully over.