It's nice to see the roster getting younger, although it is looking to me like we're just making similar mistakes to one's we've already made.
We've already traded a 1st rd pick for an already established NHL player, which seems very much like a Benning type move. An NHL player that, like Nate Schmidt before him, doesn't seem like the best fit for this team on paper. I hope I'm wrong about that.
Then there's the strategy of targeting prospects and young players instead of picks. A strat that, again, we've already seen. Rati, Kratsov and Bloom could very easily just be the next Vey, Goldobin and Etem. There are reasons that their respective teams gave up on them. Although, for the price, Bloom and Kratsov are still good gambles.
Then there's the fact that it looks like they may have already botched their first 1st rd pick. Lekkerimaki's stock has already taken a nosedive. Obviously the first reaction to this will be "We just drafted him and you're already writing him off?", but c'mon, how often does a high end prospect fall off a cliff and then regain all of their stock?
Then there's the fact that, yet again, we've failed to remove any significant money off the books. Boeser, Garland, Miller, Myers and OEL are all still here and still making their millions. Saying "we ran out of time" only works for so long and saying "teams weren't willing to meet our price" doesn't hold any water when just having the contracts on the books hurts us.
Then there's the handling of the Bruce situation and the black eye that gave the organization, and that's to say nothing about the Rachel Doerrie situation. (She seemed like somewhat of a sh#t disturber anyways, but that's another black mark on management for not being able to see that before hiring her in the first place)
On the plus side, it is nice to see things on the AHL side going well. Hopefully that ends up being a good sign for the future development of our prospects.
But still, most of the stuff we're seeing now just looks like a continuation of what we were doing under Benning. I want to be hopeful, but we've seen this movie before.