And I think VGK may have been a similar story last year. I'm still a believer in building through the draft to some extent,
but it's not the same now under a salary cap and with UFA as it was in the old days where you could build a team piece by piece and keep all the pieces forever.
Cup winners used to be built like a Ferrari, slowly, skillfully and with care. Now it's more like a Havana taxi cab - you just keep swapping out parts and try to keep it running well.
The flat cap has also skewed things too. Having reasonable and/or cheap contracts on the books is significantly more important when the cap is stagnant than it is when it's going up by a good chunk each year. There's just more flexibility in the latter situation.
If you make bad choices it's still going to hurt but it's probably a bit more manageable to get out from under them.
Vegas trades their picks away almost every year. There was only one player they drafted themselves on last year's roster.
I don't like using Vegas a benchmark on how to build a roster because they're an expansion team that had a very unique situation that no other teams can replicate. It's completely fair to use them as a comparison on how a team should play and the types of players they should target though.
As an Islander Wahlstrom has not been able to tie these things together. He may have the willingness to play this way but it yielded no results on the scorecard. I’d say that right before his knee injury Wahlstrom was more preoccupied with laying a big hit on guys along the boards than anything else.
I think players fall into the mistake of trying to emulate what other guys on the roster are known for sometimes. In Wahlstrom's case he was placed in a bottom six role and decided (or was instructed) that he needed to be like Martin and Clutterbuck, when in reality that's not his game not how he should approach the game. There's a way to play that bottom six role without being replicas of the guys that came before you.
If I remember correctly I think Todd Bertuzzi was a victim of management wanting him to play a heavier game because of his size but it's not something he was good at or wanted to do and so he never materialized into the player he should've been with the team. Instead, he went elsewhere and had a pretty good career all things considered.
There needs to be a balancing act, you can't be a Ho-Sang doing your own thing but being comfortable in the role/how you're playing is also important to having long term success.
