The gap between the impressive rhetoric in San Jose and the team’s near total inaction over the summer is staggering.
“We now become a tomorrow team,” general manager Doug Wilson told NHL.com in mid-June. He spoke of the team’s “reset/refresh” period as having ended, and a full-fledged rebuild being underway.
“We have 16 picks [at the 2014 and 2015 drafts] for a reason,” he emphasized. “We didn't trade our first-round pick last year, we're not trading it this year and we're not trading it next year and probably the year after. That's the phase we're in.”
But those strong words were not backed up by action. The Sharks signed John Scott and they stripped Joe Thornton of his captaincy; symbolic moves with extremely limited on-ice impact. The team with seven veterans with some form of no-trade or no-move clause proved unable or unwilling to deal any of them. After a while, the rhetoric got a lot weaker.
“We want to reset the hierarchy and culture in the organization,” head coach Todd McLellan told NHL.com two months af ...
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Article written by Jonathan Willis
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