Dude.. it's too painful to look backwards. Gotta look forward. Anyway, the salary figure tells you that team could never have existed. I certainly hope they could've beaten WPG with a $105M team! They could have beaten them with their current roster.

NEXT YEAR WILL BE BETTER! JUST WAIT AND SEE.

could've gotten u to game 6 i suppose.....

This question gets posted every month on here: would the Oilers be better if Chiarelli hadn't traded Hall and Eberle. The perceived answer changes with how Hall and Eberle are doing each year.

You can't see the future. Those moves were somewhat logical, on paper, at the time. More questionable moves were overpaying Lucic and trading Strome for Spooner.

Rather than ask "is Chiarelli bad," try to learn something from his mistakes: from the Hall trade, you can look more deeply at whether two or three injuries might be random, rather than a sign that a player is done. That can change how people look at someone like Kuznetsov only getting into 40 games this year. Looking at Eberle, who had two points in a seven game playoff series, sometimes the playoffs are short enough that randomness takes over and you have to look at what people do in the regular season, too. From Spooner and Lucic, obviously just because someone scored 30 goals in one situation, that does not mean that if you take them to a worse team they will suddenly give it thirty more goals. You have to have guys who can get out of your own end, first, and get the puck into the zone, and onto their sticks. Boston had that, at the time, and Edmonton didn't, so Lucic and Spooner scored goals in Boston, but not in Edmonton.

You want an answer to whether Edmonton wins the WPG series in your fantasy world? Since it's YOUR fantasy world, yes. But in reality, if you're managing Edmonton by obsessing over two bad moves that weren't even Chiarelli's worst, then you are not watching closely enough to build a playoff team.

1. The Strome for Spooner trade was part of a series of trades that took place over several months and illustrated Chiarelli not knowing what he wants. None of it would have happened if Eberle wasn't traded in the first place. That's why Eberle is in this post and not Strome.

2. The Lucic signing took place during Free Agent Frenzy 2016 and it was one of a long list of simultaneous and extravagant overpayments around the league on veteran players that were past their prime. It was less about Chiarelli not knowing what he wants (like in the Eberle/Strome/Spooner trade sequence) and more about a classic case of groupthink that swept the league at the time. Chiarelli saw Boston overpay for Backes, Vancouver overpay for Eriksson, Calgary overpay for Brouwer, etc. He then followed all those teams off a cliff

3. This ACGM post does not touch on any bad signings, just the bad trades.

4. If someone can't explain why a trade is good in 30 seconds flat while the trade looks bad at first glance, it's probably a bad trade. Pistol Pete never seemed to understand that.

5. I draw up fantasies and post about them on Capfriendly for my own amusement and for the amusement of others, even if they have no chance of happening. Plenty of other users on this site do the same thing.

6. You seem to be obsessing over two erroneous decisions by Pistol Pete more than I am, namely the signing of Lucic and and the trade for Spooner.

Yeah. I do like to try to discuss and learn from the past. If you're saying you're just having fun pretending it never happened, carry on. But it sounds like you've also thought about meaning and taken away some lessons here.

I think there are probably even more ways to interpret that series of Eberle deals, but it just went from bad to worse, in terms of how each guy played in EDM. And Larsson, whoa. Boy was he overrated at the time.