There are many things that boggle the mind in regards to MacLean's time as GM in Columbus. My two favorites involve:
a. Fielding a competitive team in 2000-2001: the year that Spezza would be available in the upcoming draft (though Kovalchuk went first) - he made the same mistake in 2003-2004 when Ovechkin and Malkin were up for grabs.
b. Signing Marchant then dumping him (via waivers of all things) to get Federov.
However this post isn't about the many failed maneuvers of Doug MacLean. It is about the one mistake he made over which he had no control:
His team wasn't placed in the South East Division.
That kind of ineptitude may have covered his own.
I wonder how many nights he lay awake thinking about how easy those teams had it while he was dealing with the likes of Detroit, Colorado, etc.
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Have a great evening everyone.
3 comments:
Regarding (a)
Do you really want to intentionally tank your season starting at game 1?
I don't agree with that. You want progress every year.
He made a lot of bad moves, but not intentionally tanking it because of high anticipated draft picks is not one of them IMO
Being newly 'expansionized':
-- his veterans weren't good enough to win anything
-- he didn't have a critical mass of young players needing to play in the NHL
-- he didn't have any generational talent
Being competitive from Game 1 on is good but keeping Geoff Sanderson, Lyle Odelein and a few others around ESPECIALLY after the trade deadline was just plain stupid.
3 less wins and they are drafting 4th overall. They also have the extra draft picks those trades bring.
An expansion team is an exercise in extreme asset management (mostly because expansion teams don't have any assets) and that means that every season is about maximizing the value of the assets you do have.
A damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't season is meaningless if the rookies that need to learn from such an experience haven't even been drafted by your team yet (and won't be for years).
He should have been more active at the half-way and deadline points in the season - making sure he got as many good FUTURE assets as he could for the players he had. Getting as good a draft pick as possible out of that is part and parcel.
He did not maximize his future assets. He failed at the most important part of his job at that point in his career in Columbus.
"Being competitive from Game 1 on is good but keeping Geoff Sanderson, Lyle Odelein and a few others around ESPECIALLY after the trade deadline was just plain stupid."
Fair enough, and I agree.
Can't see I followed their situation too closely
Definitely smarter to do it the Philly (Forsberg, Zhithnik) or St. Louis (Guerin, Tkachuk) method....
On the same note, I never understood why Sykora was still an Oiler after the deadline....
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