I have been watching this game for a long, long time. Some fans have trouble waiting 2 to 3 months let alone 2 to 3 years. Having watched a parade of incompetents manage this team for the past 30 years, Hughes and Co. have offered our beleaguered fan base a refreshing breath of insight and competency.
5 years after drafting Landeskog 2nd overall Colorado was drafting Jost at 10th OA and a year away from getting Makar at 4th OA.
6 years after drafting 3rd overall, the Habs drafted 5th overall.
13 of 23 players should be with the team when they compete, thats without "surefires" like Reinbacher and Demidov and that's not counting NHL guys like Matheson, Savard, Dvorak.Yeah you can progress , its still a rebuild though , 50% of the roster right now won't be around when we are good
Hughes started with a 1OA, Suzuki (borderline 1C), and Caufield as forwards. He got Guhle, Mailloux, Harris, and some other pieces on the back end. Monty, etc. He got Barron etc. from his fire sale.
First off that's just more evidence that the statement a rebuild should ideally take 5 years is little more then fantasy.
No rebuild starts from absolute 0, even expansion teams get given a top pick and an expansion draft.
I'm not critical of the rebuild so far, at this point anyway. It's undeniable there's been progress year on year -- you see it in the pt%. The fun and interesting next phase is where things can go sideways. We can hope for the best. I'll be a little disappointed if they treat this year as another write-off (and thus don't find a way to reinforce the roster) but it's not like he should be fired for it. Like you say, his players should bleed into the roster before we pass judgement on his ability to make a team. My point is the grade is TBD, we're not at that point yet so giving him an A is premature.
For the record I didn't give him an A, I gave him a B and yeah there's still a lot of unknowns and the hard part of a rebuild isn't the tanking portion. But I'd also point out that as important as any roster moves is the team staff he puts in place, the coaches, the scouts, the development guys, the analytics department, etc... And much like the prospect pool he's built that management side of things seems appears top notch.
In my reply to the OP, post #208, I concluded my thought with "So you can do like LShap and give him an A on what you can review so far or you can be a miser like me and give him an Incomplete/C until further notice." You're correct, a C is a judgement but I didn't mean it like that. I was infamously wrong on Slafkovsky but the fact is these high picks are extremely valuable and shouldn't go wrong, so if he whiffed on Reinbacher (re: Michkov...) that could prove to be a huge mistake. We don't know and will hope he got it right (FTR I was big on Michkov pre-draft but didn't have any issues with Reinbacher at 5OA after the draft).
Grades will change when we get more info. But there's nothing inherently wrong with grading things now with understanding that it's little more then a gut instinct that will either be proven right or wrong. It's only a problem when that gut instinct is being presented as being infallible.
Look we can't say with 100% certainty that everyone is amazing, but we can see that Nicholas has had a very positive impact on Slafkovsky. And beyond just the results we can evalaluate the process, I have little doubt that under the previous regime they would have pushed Arber Xhekaj into being a goon like they tried to do with Tinordi and McCarron where they pushed them towards trying to play tough and to get into fights and it hurt both of them. That's in stark contrast to how Hughes and company have treated Xhekaj where the focus has been on working on his weaknesses. So regardless of what ends up happening in any individual case, it's still a far better development process that has been put in place and that's something we can credit Hughes and his hires. We also see it in how occasionally the development staff would take over AHL practices and work on skills, that's a process I can get behind and support even if we haven't seen the results of it just yet.
I mean who takes those spots, are rookies expected to take over in less than a season?
You have an indelicate point. Tomorrow isn’t promised to anyone. I’m at the stage where I don’t even buy green bananas.
Maybe we could have this post, great job by the way, posted at the top of each of our threads.........guys can take a read, then a breath and rethink what they came for.
Green Bananas !! Awesome Chester!
I mean, I said "Let's say" ideally and not straight up "a rebuild should take this long." It's more of a hypothetical rather than a statement of fact that is backed up through research.
I meant no harm, just a lighthearted jab. The green banana line made me laugh out loud and my wife asked me what was going on.
