Have you ever seen me post? I'll never be accused of wearing rose colored glasses. My point is simply that WE WON so MAYBE management knows more than you seem to think they do. A GM who couldn't get it done gets praise while the one who won it gets criticized regularly. Clearly they must know SOMETHING right?
Just because we are critical of BMGM doesn't mean we aren't also giving him credit where it's due. I have no idea what your talking about in reference to another GM, who was giving another GM credit? There was some McPhee praise during the playoffs and debate over in in a thread here. That has nothing to do with being realistic regarding BMGM. He himself thought this could be a year we missed the playoffs. He had no faith in our roster or coaching staff, or our farm. It was Trotz and the coaching staff finding solutions in Hershey that paid off as well as getting some grit depth support.
I don't get why you have to boil the discussion down to simple platitudes though. Why does it have to be, either management knows more than I think they do or they don't know as much as I think they do. That isn't at the heart of the debate. It's looking at specific moves and actions and judging those decisions. BMGM in his tenure here very much has had an aura of "make big bold moves" and it just so happens that some of those bold moves thankfully involved players with character. But I also think coaching staff has a lot to factor in, because they wanted more character guys and would constantly bench more skilled ones. Burt, Vrana, Bowey, the list goes on of the depth guys that sat for Walker, Gersich, Stephenson, Chiasson. The evidence simply isn't there to say "BMGM clearly knew what he was doing when he did X".
Stating that doesn't somehow undo the credit he does deserve, specifically as it relates to Nisky/Orpik, Oshie, and Eller. But again those are situations where as mentioned, those trades only seem so right in hindsight. Up to that point we had tried a lot of options to kickstart this teams mentality heading into the playoffs. There wasn't really any evidence before hand that it would be these group to help do that, only that we knew going in some of those names were harder workers/more known to shown up in the post-season. I think that is part of the problem is that seeing a GM who thought he had a struggling team, and fans who thought the same go all the way makes one wonder if it isn't just management but fans who are misguided about what it takes to win.
That said, I thought based on the prospect info we could go on that we had a fine draft. Again good and bad decisions don't happen in a bubble, and it remains to be seen how big of a blow losing Trotz is. For all we know we face the Isles in the first round and Trotz is a key to their coaching staff in defeating us. One bad decision can outweigh 5 good ones. Ultimately having question marks in relation to management here is still absolutely realistic post a Cup win. And even if we were to repeat, let's assume that happens. That doesn't necessarily mean it'll be due entirely to our GM either. Again the "maturity" factor of our roster is something nobody accounted for, and if we do repeat I'm going to argue that it'll likely have something to do with it.
