Quote:
Originally Posted by Galaxy
If things continue the way downhill, do you think they need to blow-up the team and rebuild (starting with the idea of a top 3 draft pick)?
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Well, that was pretty much the expectation for next year anyway. We're already the oldest team in the league (just over 30 on average) and have a fair number of the older guys coming off the books after this year. We're in cap hell, surprisingly enough, but that's only for this year, which means we're scraping for players and searching for cap exceptions whenever someone goes down.
The fans are hopeful that players like Brind'Amour and Aaron Ward will retire/move on after this year and allow a new core of young players we've got down in Albany to come up and join Staal and Ward. To some extent it's begun as Brandon Sutter was initially in Albany to start the season, but has pretty much cemented his place on the big roster with his performance in this mess. Will it continue? It's hard to say. Having watched the team over the years, patterns have emerged in Jim Rutherford's abilities. In-season, the guy is a mastermind at finding scrap-heap, recover-and-rebuild players (and coaches, both Maurice and Laviolette) who will make contributions to better the team, even if they don't push the team over the top necessarily. However, I'll be blunt and say he's not very good in offseason activities except for maybe drafting talent. He tends to be too loyal to players, especially older ones, and overcompensates them at contract time (see Cole, Erik). He also seems to too often sign free agents that just don't work out here.
So, fans generally have said the season is lost at this point and are right now looking at who's tradeable (if anyone could be from this mess) and what's coming off the books and hoping the rebuild begins in earnest next year, but I don't know how aggressive Rutherford will be about it, mainly because of his "loyalty" issues.