Yeah, I even cut him some slack for the Grubauer and Oleksiak signings…maybe even the Burakovsky one…because he was trying to make a big splash that inaugural year and give the team an aura of legitimacy. Still doing that 5 years later, however…
This smacks of the kind of armchair quarterbacking that translates into a cheap shot. Who would have you taken ahead of Beniers and Evans? How about ahead of Wright? Sale seemed a reasonable risk given the circumstances. Larsson was arguably our best player the first three years. You can park mistakes at Francis' door for sure, but your criticism of him seems more smug and opportunistic than well reasoned.
Arizona was 3rd in the conference and in like a 5 way tie for 3rd overall at that point in time with half the season left, to be fair. The trade was Merkely, who had good draft pedigree but never made it in the NHL, Bahl, who was a pretty decent piece and a 2nd round pick, Schnarr who was a 3rd round draft pick who hadn't seen any NHL time, and a conditional 1st and 3rd (top 3 protected). Hall was 2 years removed from his MVP year but had only played less than half the season. They also got Kessel that summer when he was still pretty much in his prime. Pretty different circumstances- in hindsight it was a bad move but I think that's a pretty reasonable trade at the time. Who knew they would f***ing crater after that lol.
I’ve been saying this for years to the consternation of most Kraken fans.
Eh my Islanders say hi. You guys are my Western team I root for and you’re infinitely more interesting that my main team
Well the "I told you so's" always come out when things go bad for any team but there's a question of optimism and pessimism and you need patience in sports.
The end-of-season changes will be very indicative of what ownership wants. Any GM change, whether that is via a promotion or firing shows that management realizes that they need a different type of GM to fix things.
You may be missing the point. No one is saying we need to trade our top prospects. The fact is that our GM has signed the likes of Burakovsky, Schwartz, Stephenson, and many other mediocre players and tried to sell them as fielding a competitive team. He is already on year 4 with not much to really show for the present and/or the future. Outside of Catton, I am not confident any prospect has top-line potential on our team. And even that is far from a guarantee. If you want to build a team with the draft the least you try to do is stock up on 1st round picks by selling impending UFA's. For a team going into its 5th draft, its surprising that a team trying to build via the draft has not had any additional 1st round picks.
He got Stephenson on the team knowing what type of wingers were already available on the team. Defending the Stephenson signing is asinine because that was made to improve the team today not if we get elite wingers over the next 2-3 drafts and plug them in next to Stephenson when he is 34 and playing as our 3C or 4C. His underlying numbers are atrocious and his AAV and Cap hit make no sense from where the team was when he got signed.
