Brendan Batchelor

To your point, I think it is an emotional decision.

And I would be lying to say that if there wasn't emotion tied up, in my opinion, on Elias Pettersson as well as someone that's had to watch him play every single game for the last couple of years at the level that he's played at.

So maybe some patience and that fresh perspective and a bit more time to work with him to try and get him back to being a productive player for this team or a more productive player for this team.

um would make sense but my reaction as someone that's watched it is that you know i think as we talk about the culture shifting and we talk about the benefits of moving out some of the veterans uh that happened prior to the trade deadline this year that i don't think that job is done yet and so um my feeling anyway is that whoever comes in needs to be decisive one way or another about

which way they are going to take this team and the players that potentially need to be moved on to continue that positive culture shift that we saw for the deadline onwards.

Yeah, and that kind of depends, again, getting back to the point I made off the top about internally everybody needing to be on the same page.

I guess that all depends on what they decide collectively internally.

is the approach that they're going to take, right?

Because this was a very painful season, as everybody knows.

And as much as we talk a lot about needing patience with the rebuild and needing to take a longer-term approach, it would not surprise me if there was some thought internally that, no, we can't continue to have –

losing teams that don't compete the way that the team did this past season.

And in fact, we need to accelerate things, which is, I know not what people want to hear, but I think we have to go in eyes wide open that that is a possibility that these are the conversations that they're having about where they're going to go from here.

So, you know, I agree.

If you want to take a longer view of things, then the assets that you could accrue to

by trading Philip Heronic would just add to your quiver of, of draft picks or young players that can help a longer term rebuild.

So that's another thing I'd be really curious to hear from Evan gold or Ryan Johnson, who, or whoever the next general manager is, is, are they taking a longer term view of things?

Are they,

you know, willing to be more patient and willing to make some of those moves that maybe the previous regime wasn't considering?

Or are they saying, you know, we're hoping to operate on a tighter timeline here.

And as a result, we want a guy like Philip Heronic within the organization.