As an outsider who really likes them, it has to be a combination of owner and GM at this point. The owner is brutal. Period. Everyone knows it. Adams seems pretty poor. He has held on to more young, smallish, softish talent than he could ever fit on an active roster, even if he didn’t give any spots to vets or players cut from different moulds, and there simultaneously isn’t enough space for them all to get opportunities (and as they get a year older and a year older, their value begins to diminish) but also aren’t enough quality vets to actually guide and grow the young players they’ve stock piled. Their approach to roster building has been too passive. They haven’t made many “hard” choices. Can you have Cozens and Peterka and Quinn and Benson and Kulich and Rosen all on the roster? Along with Tage and Tuch? I feel like that’s 8 players who are really top-six or bust with Tuch being the only real veteran and very little size or bite or grit. It’s meant to be a rhetorical question. About 4 of them have to go, with two forwards that bring some diversity to the top six coming back and some genuine quality in the bottom six coming in. And they still have Ostlund and Helenius and Wahlberg and probably more I’m forgetting. You can’t have them all in the lineup. They’re all kids. It doesn’t matter how long you’re patient with some of them in the minors. They’re still all young, all mostly smallish, all mostly non-physical… it just isn’t going to ever work… so start identifying building block players and start making some aggressive moves to acquire the types of players you don’t have, who can guide the kids you do choose to keep.
