Alex Anthopoulos

And, you know, maybe when you're a young GM and you're scuffling and people try to make excuses for you and say, well, you know, you have a lot of guys on the IL and you have all this.

And you might buy into that stuff as a young GM.

You're thinking, OK, how can I make myself feel better about why we're not performing and all that kind of stuff?

And the bottom line is every team in every sport will have multiple injuries and building out the roster.

And look, there are moments where I felt like last season, it was just an avalanche.

It was more than we've ever had.

We had a whole rotation.

on the IL.

So look, in years past, once you start going through that, you start studying years past.

So we would lose two significant starters a year, which is still big.

We'd lose Max Fried for huge chunks of the year, Soroka for the entire season, Strider for the entire season, Acuna for the entire season.

But you'd lose probably two of those guys.

And then you'd lose a handful of guys a month, two months, and so on.

But you would get them back at some point.

In my opinion, you should be able to survive those things.

Once you start getting into five, six, seven, eight guys that are out for the year, I don't think anyone can overcome those things.

And that's ultimately what we went through last season.

And it was tough.

Ten years in a row for myself, I'd been in the playoffs twice.

seven years in a row in Atlanta, six divisions in a row.