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First off if you're drafting and player development is great it makes it that much better for you to make trades to improve your team. Thats why teams like ...pens, caps, kings, hawks, sharks, rangers, nash always are able to make trades for star players because there drafting and player development are strong. MB can't or as he says it finds it hard to make trades because his drafting and player development is weak.

A GM doesn't need to push out Carey Price, Max Pacioretty, Brendan Gallagher or some of the other stars who are still in their late 20s on this team. While there are issues in not replacing Markov and Plekanec... the idea that he has failed by not finding a better goalie than Price through drafting and development is silliness. A good GM should take the pieces he inherits, keep the good ones, build a core, and augment in places that need augmenting. The problem has nothing to do with the fact that Bergevin hasn't replaced the Gainey/Gauthier core. It has to do that he never augmented it. He never added a piece to the forward group in his time, specifically the much needed centre. And he didn't replace the aging vets creating more holes... In fact one of the core moves he made to replace a gainey/gauthier core piece with one of his own (Subban for Weber) is a move that shouldn't have been made. So while I don't like Bergevin, i think the reason you don't like him is not the problem.

Don't take my post as a defense of MB. I've been firmly in the camp of he needs to be fired since the trade deadline failure. He had many chances to find that piece and failed. The price for Brayden Schenn was cheap and we weren't even involved.

A few things... First of all, I'm never going to predict for the Habs to miss the playoffs in that contest. Tied in with that, 95 points was the second lowest total out of anyone who predicted. Thirdly, just on the second page of that thread, I posted my doubts about the team. Finally, there were post after post where I stated that this was the first year in my life where I didn't feel as though we could contend for a cup. Making the playoffs was and still is achievable in my mind. I'm actually probably one of the rare people who believe that still. Winning the cup without any substantial additions, however, is a whole other story. The reason I predicted what I did is because I've generally always been a positive fan and didn't want to regurgitate all this negativity but it was very simple in that I could not imagine how a team who had 8 million in cap space could fully expect to compete for a cup, when there were players somewhat available to us who could have increased our odds had they been on our team.

While Pacioretty does seem to play best with Danault, keep in mind that he's inevitably going to 'do jack' for a 5-6 game stretch at minimum after playing well for 5 or 6. This is what he does...it's as predictable as the sun rising in the morning and setting at night. Max has been absolutely useless for the past 5 games, right on schedule: