tbf, other than Dermott, this is a 99% Benning Roster. The Abbotsford Canucks are a top 10 team in the AHL which is also a 100% Benning roster. The player personnel wasn't the problem, it was the coach.
Benning did fail in other aspects though which was investing into player morale, facilities, management hires which also indirectly affects team performance on the ice.
Don't really agree. The roster had/has major flaws, particularly speed on the back end and decent penalty killers. I don't think they're quite as good as their record is under Boudreau. Their top players have regressed closer to norms but they've largely ridden hot goaltending. They look like a team that is around 12-17 in the league in terms of talent and have maxed the cap and mortgaged the future (in cap space AND assets) to be this. That is horrendous.
The players had maybe tuned out Green a bit, but I'm also pretty sure the players had lost confidence in the management and direction of the team and it showed. Like other professions that perhaps posters in this board have experience with, if the rank and file or key employees have lost faith in upper management and don't believe in them, it can affect motivation and performance across the board. They still put a shift in and work "hard", but results will inevitably suffer over the long term. I think that the change in management had as much to do with the turnaround as the change in coaching.
As for the AHL team, who cares if they're a top 10 team if it's almost all driven by a bunch of vets? There are maybe 6 young players (Klimovich, Lockwood, Rathbone, Woo, DiPietro, and Silovs) that have even a half-decent chance of being replacement level NHLers, and maybe only 2 that have a decent chance of having any sort of lasting impact. That's atrocious for a team that has been a perennial loser for 8 years.