It wouldn't make it a bad move, but the whole point of making moves is to advance your team toward one goal, the Cup. There's nothing to gloat about other than the Cup. Some of these clowns who gloat about Ovechkin scoring 5 billion goals in a season, blah blah blah. The Cup validates everything, it's not the other way around. The Cup trumps all.
The "look like idiots" was referring to dumping on the Bruins because of Seguin's regular season success, which ultimately doesn't really matter. But I was mistaken in interpreting you guys anyway, you weren't doing that, so.
It's more about the fans, than the actual teams. Fans want to say their team won the trade. Like Leaf fans after the Kessel trade, they got the best player in the deal, so that was their argument for winning the trade. Well when the Bruins won the Cup two years later, that trumps every single goal Kessel will ever score for the Leafs.
Not winning the Cup doesn't mean you made bad moves, it means you didn't make enough moves, or the right moves, not just that year, but the years leading up to it. The Stars didn't acquire Seguin just to improve their team, they acquired him to be the face of the franchise for the next 10+ years and to lead them to Stanley Cups.
Sadly, my football team is the Denver Broncos. When they went and threw 20+ million dollars a year at Peyton Manning, they didn't do it just to improve the team from Tim Tebow. They did it to win Super Bowls. If Peyton Manning retires without winning any Super Bowls for the Denver Broncos, especially if he loses in pathetic fashion like the last two years, that will be considered a failure of a move. It made them good, but not good enough. Different sports, and I don't want to get into it too in depth because I'll end up writing a novel that nobody will probably read, but the analogy works.
