Hahaha sorry I had to

So in hindsight, Toronto gave a 1st, a 2nd, a 3rd, and a 4th and a midlevel prospect AND a bunch of other stuff (McCabe, schenn, deals, etc...) to get out of the 1st round....barely. In hindsight thats a pretty substantial package that they dont have the resources to do again, all for limited gain.

While I like the acquisitions they've made at forward, their acquisitions/proposed defense looks uneven at best. Losing O'reilly who signed for a fair bargain at 4.5mil and Schenn at 3mil when we signed Klingberg for over 4mil seem quite bad. The playoffs werent kind to any of the youngsters either (with timmins a healthy scratch throughout, Liljegren a healthy scratch half the time, Knies getting injured).

and now still being over cap by 1.2 (with really only dropping jarnkrot as the answer), with pretty meagre help in the minors, few impact prospects in the system and missing so many high picks ALL on top of half the team expiring in 23-24 and almost the rest of the team expiring in 24-25, the future is now, but its not later thats for sure.

Here's the thing

Schenn's deal isnt good

Klingberg is signed for 1 year if he does well that deal is good as he can go make more elsewhere. If he doesnt do good dont got to add an asset to move him or buy him out

Schenn will be 36 at the end of his deal and that amount of money was overkill considering contract projections had him at 1.6m. He did look good next to Reilly yes but by year 2 or 3 of that deal a drop off would occur.

O'Reilly didnt want to stay as the pressure of Toronto got to him. Fine replaced him with Bertuzzi and Domi who sure arent as good defensively but are younger and solid goal offensive guys.

As for Acciari would have liked to keep him but he wanted to stick with Dubas.

Either way gave up assets but it helped us beat a team who went to the SCF 3 times in a row and if Bob didnt wake up and go super mode who knows how far they would have went.

Either way they gave up assets but it helped them break a 19 year gap from the second round and even though the 3 left in FA, Tree adequately replaced them and who knows he might not be done.

I agree with most of this. They had to go all in last season. I thought Dubas did a great job of putting together a playoff-ready team with those late-season changes. Just because they didn’t go all the way doesn’t mean those moves were bad. There are no guarantees in the playoffs. All you can do is maximize your chances. I think that team had as good a chance as anybody.

Like you, I would have liked to have seen O’Reilly, Schenn and Acciari come back. The other UFAs I didn’t mind leaving. I knew O’Reilly was a long shot, because he would have had to want to stay in Toronto badly enough to take less money and term than he could get elsewhere. I would not have signed him to the contract he got from Nashville. Same with Schenn. I probably would have been ok with giving Acciari the contract he got from Pittsburgh, but I would have been a little nervous about the third year.

I disagree with you slightly on Treliving’s moves. I like Bertuzzi as a replacement for Bunting – he should be an upgrade if he stays healthy – but I think it would be unfair to expect Domi to be a replacement for O’Reilly. He’ll probably take Kerfoot’s spot, which should be an upgrade, especially in the playoffs since he’s had two good playoff runs with two different teams the last two seasons. So if those guys are upgrades over the people they’re replacing, that should help, but I still see some gaps due to the loss of O’Reilly and Acciari. (Reaves is not a good replacement for Acciari.) Perhaps those could be addressed at the deadline.

Klingberg is where we disagree. He eats up $4M of valuable cap space, and he isn’t what they needed. What I like most about what Treliving’s done though is that he didn’t give up any futures to do it. I don’t think Dubas was wrong to give up the picks he traded at last season’s deadline, but if you can improve your team without giving up futures, that’s even better. I also like that Trevling has avoided long-term contracts. That was a big concern for me after what he did in Calgary.