Follow @james_tanner123 It's too bad the new Las Vegas franchise didn't hire me to be it's GM. While George McPhee is an old-school hockey lifer who will do a competent job, I would have done better.
New team, new vision.
I'd have done things differently.
McPhee is going to try to get the best players, build the best team possible. He hired Gerard Gallant to be the coach and he'll try his old-school best to make the team as competitive as possible as soon as possible. He's already singed a half-way decent Russian to play on the team.
This is all so dumb and predictable.
I want a guy with outspoken, possibly crazy opinions and ideas. His main goal is to lose hockey games and talk to the media about it. It doesn't matter if he's any good or if he's a good teacher, because no one who is going to be on my eventual good team is going near him.
The next thing I would do is go through all 30 teams and get them to pay me draft picks for not picking guys they can't protect. Not all teams have problems, but rather then let teams like the Coyotes or Leafs use their available spots to their advantage, I want to get paid and get some extra assets.
When the expansion draft comes, I tank it on purpose. I pick the worst players from each team. I don't want a single good player on my roster.
The only good players I'll pick are guys who I think I might be able to trade later. Otherwise, I want a team full of duds. I want a team so bad I make the late 80s, early 90s Nordiques look good.
Once I have my team full of losers, I'll head to the NHL draft.
Sixth pick? What crap.
I am definitely trading down. I want to maximize the number of picks I can get. I will try to move down a spot at a time and get a whole bunch of secondary picks for later.
The goal is to stock my farm system with lottery tickets.
Once this goes down, it's UFA time. I seek out the greediest players. The ones who'll come play on my garbage team in exchange for tons of ice-time and money. What they don't know is that they're getting traded as soon as it's legal to do so.
What we will do this entire time, however, is use our salary cap room to pick up assets from other teams. Got a bad contract? Send me a pick. Stuck in a jam? Send me a pick. etc.
After three seasons of tanking, trading down and acquiring assets , we will have one of the best young teams in the NHL.
But here's the kicker: none of our players are going straight to the NHL. Once we have a sweet cache of rookies, we enter them into the league all at once and use our extremely cheap ELC contracts to our advantage by maxing out on free-agents and trading some of our cache for high-priced playas.
So to recap: Tank for three years, acquire assets, then go all-in when we have six or ten high-quality rookies and can game the salary cap, at which point we'll be the best team in the league and a contender for the next five or ten years.
Let's see if George McPhee can top that.
(He can't).