Well...there was a lot of talk on here back in the day about the red wine summits with Katz and his 'boys on the bus' gang.
Safe to say that there was plenty of meddling as a result of those 'meetings'.
Katz set this team back a few years right out of the gate IMO.
Yakupov was the consensus no.1 overall pick anyway. People acting like the Oilers went off the board, Yakupov was supposed to be the player that Kucherov is now.
If the Oilers had passed on him and he had gone on to become a superstar somewhere else, we'd never hear the end of it. Beyond that, Ryan Murray sucked too.
Chiarelli dug his own grave when the hockey gods gifted him ... Barzal/Kyle Conner/Boeser/Erikson Ek/Chabot and he opted to rubber stamp a trade for Griffin Reinhart. He then passed on DeBrincat to take Benson.
He then passed on Tkachuk to take Puljujarvi.
He then bet the next 6 years on Lucic being the top winger.
You can get some of these wrong, but if you get ALL of them wrong, you can't really cry later that you screwed yourself. It's like a game of hockey and missing 4 empty net tap ins and then opting for a wind up slapshot on a breakaway that goes 5 feet over the net and then wondering after the game why you lost.