0% chance I'm giving a 1st round pick for him after that sales pitch

Sounds like a great strategy

How to not GM 101

so in year 6 of a 7 year deal, he has a bad stretch of games at 33 and now he's "set the roster back a decade"? yikes.
also, lol, imagine caring about who the captain of the team is like that matters to literally anyone outside the dressing room.

It set the team back the minute he signed it. Argue all you want about “having to sign a player like that when he comes available.” There was zero reason to do it at the time. Many people were skeptical. That skepticism looks to be true more and more. The last 6 years would have been much better with kadri as our 2C on a 4.5 million dollar cap hit. Even if there weren’t any FA defenceman immediately available, it would’ve given us way more flexibility. The most pointless signing of all time. Brought nearly nothing to this team in 6 years he’s been here.

lol no one is paying that for Tavares

no, it didnt. there were lots of reasons to do it and Kadri was traded because he made himself a liability two years in a row with the leafs, then he proved them right the year after by doing it again. He was also traded in an attempt to address an actual need. You can say that part failed sure, but Kadri at 2C does not net the leafs anything over Tavares as a 2C and just because you have some image of flexibility in your head doesnt mean it was an actual thing that could or would have happened.
The tavares signing was only bad in the sense that the leafs didnt do anything with it, and that has more to do with forces out of their control than anything, like the cap was literally projected to jump 10-15 mill over the next few years. But hey, they might have signed pietroangelo and had the exact same thing happen but in this case you'd be saying that signing was bad and set the leafs back by a decade

How does a GM "force" a player to waive a NMC?

Is this the NKHL?

North Korean Hockey League?

The Kadri trade had nothing to do with his playoff suspensions. Once we signed Tavares, it didn't make any sense to have Kadri at 3C when our blueline was so rough. The trade not working out was unfortunate (Kadri refused to waive his NTC to CGY when we wanted Brodie). The cap being stagnant was also out of our control. I recognize that. But that doesn't change my feelings about the signing at the time it was made. Had we signed someone like Pietrangelo instead, it would've been fine, considering he would be addressing a significant position of need. You also fail to mention that Kadri won the Stanley Cup as a 2nd centre. I don't understand why it's so hard to see why signing an 11-million-dollar centre that we didn't need COULD be a major reason this team has never found significant success in the palyoffs. Even if the cap wasn't flat, he probably only brought like 1 season (18-19) that was worth his contract. He's been just below a point per game every single season since.

the kadri trade had everything to do with the suspensions, He was an out and out liability and pretty much everyone agreed. He literally cost the leafs two series.
And again, if the leafs had signed pietroangelo instead of tavares it doesnt fix what was wrong with the team during any of the series save maybe the montreal one but that's because Pietro probably isnt in a spot to get his head taken off by Perry in a series that would have been solved in game 4 or 5 by having tavares/kadri able to score instead of hurt. But hey, maybe then Kadri gets hurt in the identical way and it plays out the same.
The Leafs issues until this season have boiled down to secondary scoring in literally every series. replacing tavares with kadri and adding a defender doesnt fix that.

What a truly bizzare post 🤯.
First, show me proof that “ many people were skeptical” when he signed; absolute falsehood. Everyone expected his play to drop off as he aged, but no one predicted that Covid would gut the salary cap for 3-4 years 🤷🏻.
Was he alone at fault for playoff losses? Matthews & Marner had 0 @ 1 goals respectively vs Panthers. And he didn’t even play when we lost to habs (Canada division).
I don’t get either the vitriol vs Tavares nor the doom & gloom before they’ve even played a game post TDL .
Like I said, bizzare

There's literally a zero percent chance the Kadri trade had "everything" to do with suspensions. That's laughable. That would make it even more embarrassing for Dubas. Traded him for nothing based on nothing. But I personally believe that good NHL GMs, like Dubas, are able to overlook certain events like that for the purpose of making your team as best as it can be. Trading Kadri was the right move because of what we needed at the time, not because of the suspensions... until you can find legit proof that that is why he was traded.

You can't possibly know whether Pietrangelo and Kadri wouldn't help the Leafs get farther than what Tavares himself has brought to the team. My point is that signing him was completely unnecessary at the time because of positional need and age. With how little we have accomplished with Tavares, you sound a little too certain that we would be in the same spot with Kadri and Pietrangelo. Can depth scoring not be resolved by having a legitimate #1 defenceman on the team? having a bonafide superstar defenceman can tilt the ice for you at all times, no matter which forward line is out there with them. Not to mention, we were/are one of the lowest-scoring teams from our blueline. And if depth scoring was our main issue, then what if we didn't sign Pietrangelo and instead were able to trade/sign for difference-makers in the bottom-6 ? The tradeoff from Kadri to Tavares wasn't worth the extra 6.5 million dollars.

Nobody is giving you a first for Johnny cement boots UFA to be

Xd