Drafting Chabot, Sanderson, Stutzle (while byfield and lafreniere are struggling he is a point per game), Tkachuk, Batherson, Formenton, Pinto and Greig, signing Giroux and trading for Norris and Debrincat were all good moves and have built a core around which we can compete for many years in the future.
Chabot : Murray was still GM in 2015 but was already sick
Sanderson : 5th OA pick in a great draft. Would be a shame to miss out here
Stutzle : 3rd OA pick in a great draft, that pick was the result of trading Karlsson which came from the previous regime
Tkachuk : 4th OA pick, again hard to screw up. Let's not forget we missed out on another 4th OA pick the following year because of Dorion trading
Batherson, Formenton, Pinto and Greig : great picks where they were made. Trent Mann is the "man" for the Sens draft and the guy was hired by Bryan Murray in 2011. Murray actually revamped the whole scouting department after he took over from Muckler. I believe several scouts are still there
No team in recent history has blown it up as big as we did after 2017.
At the time they were traded:
Karlsson - two time Norris winner
Duchene - PPG #1 center
Stone - PPG Selke candidate
Hoffman - 1st/2nd line winger
Pageau - elite 3rd line center
Brassard - 2nd line center
Dzingel - 2nd line winger
It's honestly incredible how weak our pipeline is after trading what amounts to a good top 6 forward group and one of the best D in the league, and finishing bottom 10 for 5 (going on 6) straight years.
The Dzingel trade pretty much sums up Dorion's time as a GM
Trade Dzingel for Duclair and two 2nd round picks
- let 25 y/o Duclair walk for NOTHING
- traded a 2nd for Derek Stepan who had a 6.5 AAV, a pure cap dump
- traded a 2nd for Matt Murray, the most injury prone NHL player and give him a giant contract
That's the thing with Dorion, everytime he does something great/good, he finds a way to screw it up. Gets Giroux and DeBrincat this summer, manages to have an horrible bottom-6 when it could have been a strength
Like who? Give me examples. Which teams have walked away from a rebuild with more and better assets than Dorion has through trades?
Montreal by trading Ben Chariot, Artturi Lehkonen and Brett Kulak
Add trading for Sean Monahan, might get 2 firsts out of this. Budget yes, but he could have done stuff like that instead of overpaying bad players.
Oh and about your point of "How many awful contracts are we stuck with?"... we have spent a lot of assets, time and money to repair Dorion mistakes.