Great to see such reasoned & warranted criticism 👍

Great to see a Vegan Commie Hipster in the chat, those are my kinda people

Yeah but you also have to remember he was working under the assumption that the cap was going up at the time he extended Faulk. Which to be fair, we still had the money for Petro even with Faulk (who I think will rebound this year). Scandella is the one I don’t get. I mean we’ll never know how negotiations went, but I think the Scandella extension said a lot.

That said Dougie could drive to my house and punch me in the mouth and I’d probably still not be mad. I guess Lord Stanley hasn’t worn off yet

I'm not sure I can get on board with that train of thought because independent of the incremental cap increases it didn't make sense to do. At the time, the general thinking was that Faulk would help our power play and that would probably be about it. That's cool because our power play was bad heading into last season, but you simply cannot pay that much money and that much term to someone if that's all he's going to do especially when you already have two better defensemen overall playing on that side (so you're forcing someone to play where they aren't comfortable), one of whom is an elite defenseman, and your captain, and needs a new contract. And I'm of the opinion that Faulk's "value" on the power play isn't really all that valuable (and we saw this when he lost his freaking power play spot last year!) considering he does a lot of shooting on the power play and you really want those shots to be coming from closer to the net than the point.

And what was the rush? Why paint yourself into a corner with Pietrangelo by rushing into things with Faulk as opposed to just trading for Faulk and having him as a fallback in case negotations don't go well with Pietrangelo? Obviously this looks worse with Covid like you say but not that much worse than it already looked.

Scandella at least I can kind of get because our left side was shot other than Dunn and they stupidly refuse to give Dunn any more ice time, but it is way too much term and enough money to be a headache, he'll be 34 by the end and we'll have lefties that will be better than him by next year. But that's a contract we can get out of at least, Faulk is probably not.

I think (I hope!) Faulk will be better than he was but I really cannot see him possibly being good enough to live up to year 1 of that contract (let alone year six) or to make us believe letting Pietrangelo walk was a good move. And clearly the front office agrees, considering they got Faulk to help our power play and then this offseason went out and got Krug...who is known primarily for his power play skills. Baffling decision making in my opinion, and I'm not satisfied enough with one cup to ignore it. This team is (was?) good enough to win again, you only get so many kicks at the can, and the reasons our current roster is not the above roster are entirely self-inflicted.