Edmonton fires GM Chiarelli

[Psych3man]

Interesting...

 

[davnlaguna]

Mikko Koskinen contract the final straw?

 

[PuckinUgly57]

Interesting...

Not really, this guy has been on the hot seat the last 2 years or so but it really cranked up the last few weeks.

He did a great job in Boston building the 2011 Bruins that won the Cup, a lot of those guys are still there but Don Sweeney has done a decent job of identifying players to keep and players to move out over the years. Blake could take note from guys like Sweeney because he has completely underwhelmed as GM so far who walked into a similar situation with players and contracts.

I think Sweeney failed at the 2015 draft where he had three straight 1st round picks, 13th - 15th. The 13th was LA's from the Lucic trade, the 14th was theirs and the 15th was Calgary's from the Dougie Hamilton trade.

He hit it good with their pick (Jake DeBrusk) but it's getting close to figuring out if Jakub Zboril (LA's pick) and Zach Senyshyn (Calgary's pick) are NHL players. Senyshyn has yet to play an NHL game, and Zboril was called up in November, appeared in 2 games with no impact or points and sent back down to Providence.

Now Chiarelli was fired in May 2015 and these guys were drafted in June, so I'm not sure if these were Sweeney's picks or if he relied on the scouting staff since there wasn't much time to evaluate other players he maybe would have wanted instead and he trusted the staff similar to what Blake did in 2016 after Dumbo was fired and he relied on Futa.

But Boston literally missed out on Barzal, Connor and Chabot at 16th-18th in that order since all 3 were there for the taking and if all he got was DeBrusk (solid player) out of 3 pretty decent position 1st round picks, that's no good.

It's comparable to what Taylor did in 2003, arguably the deepest draft in NHL history since every 1st round pick played in the NHL (Jessiman, who went one spot before Brown was the worst, only 2 NHL games 8 years after being drafted by NYR but appearing for Florida), the 2nd round (Eriksson, Bergeron, Weber and Backes to just name a few) was unreal, the 4th round producing tenured guys like Jan Hejda and Kyle Quincey, the 6th with solid guys like Marc Method and Nate Thompson, the 7th with Pavelski, the 8th with Byfuglien and the 9th with a guy like Halak. Taylor really screwed up taking Boyle (26th) and Tambellini (27th) so while it's similar to Boston I think Taylor did worse since this draft produced NHLers from almost every round from 1-9 and I don't think we will see such a draft again in our lifetime.

Chiarelli made some really suspect moves throughout his tenure there and essentially blew 4 years of McJesus. This guy deserved to be fired some time ago.

Mikko Koskinen contract the final straw?

I thought so too but apparently his deal (3 years/$13.5 million) was blessed by Oiler management, which is really perplexing considering Koskinen has a whopping 32-35 NHL games experience. It no doubt signals the end of Talbot in Edmonton, but it's eye raising to think Chiarellli gave a deal like that to an unproven player.