Pokecheque wrote:
Hard to say what #91 does now, but I'm guessing this upheaval doesn't happen if Tavares advocates for them. I'm not saying he's pulling an Eichel, but if he intimated to anyone in the organization that he was lukewarm about Garth and Weight and the direction the franchise was going, then that was probably enough for ownership to finally pull the trigger.
This is long overdue, but Garth still deserves credit for guiding the franchise through some of its darkest times.
Plusses:
Hoodwinked Peter Chiarelli not once, but TWICE, and got Mathew Barzal and Jordan Eberle out of the deal.
Took advantage of teams doing cap purges and got two top-pairing guys in Nick Leddy and Johnny Boychuk.
Players like Anders Lee, Barzal, Josh Bailey, Anthony Beauvillier, Calvin de Haan, Casey Cizikas, and the other Sebastian Aho are all solid wins for the Isles player development.
Managed to convince John Tavares to take below-market money for his first free agent contract, though I'm fairly certain he won't settle for that this time around.
The Mark Streit signing was actually a very good move, too bad the team just wasn't ready at that time.
Minuses:
Too many first-round whiffs (Strome, Reinhart, Dal Colle, though he parlayed two of them into the players listed above) in recent drafts.
Never hired the right coach.
Completely and utterly mishandled the Nino Niederreiter situation, then made it worse by overpaying Cal Clutterbuck.
Traded a first-rounder for Thomas Vanek, and that particular, ahem, gamble did not pay off. But in hindsight he at least may have dodged a bullet there (the GM who signed him shortly after that season concluded lost his job this offseason as well).
You'd think a former goalie would have done better shoring up the space between the pipes, but alas, he went through 2016-17 with an embarrassing three-goalie situation because he was too indecisive and afraid of losing J-F Berube on waivers (turns out he wasn't all that to begin with anyway) and then went into the following season with the same goalie that cleared waivers just a few months beforehand at the top of the depth chart. That, more than anything else, is probably why he's no longer a general manager.
He has also found some diamonds in the NHL scrap heap- Matt Moulson scored 30 3 times for the Isles. Grabner had 34 & 20, then had injury issues that couldn't have been foreseen. Thomas Hickey has even been a good waiver pickup too.
But I agree, the Berube fiasco was ridiculous. I get that they needed a third goalie due to Halak's injury issues, but keeping 3 miserable goalies wasn't good. I've said all along that I can't believe Snow didn't put a larger priority on his former position.
And the summer he put all his eggs in the Stamkos basket was when he lost me. He never even made calls to see what Okposo or Martin wanted, and only called Nielsen's agent after Stamkos had signed, which thoroughly pissed Nielsen off and he left. That summer was a huge step backwards, and they haven't recovered yet. I know Matt Martin is not a great hockey player, but he was a huge part of the Isles, and that 4th line was great when he was on it. None of those players have had that kind of success since he left.
Snow hasn't been entirely terrible, but he's had more than a fair shake, and they still haven't turned a corner, even if they looked to have a few years ago.