Here's my perspective. As dumb as I am, I know what I see in front of my face and I simply cannot fathom the circumstances where somebody getting paid to analyze talent for a professional hockey club watched Jordan play 43 NHL games over two seasons and thought a one way contract was a good idea. I don't care that they risked losing what is CLEARLY a career minor league talent to Europe. So what? Go find another cheap option in some other club's program. Those deals get done all the time. Absolutely not even a challenge for a professional management team.
So. Yeah. I keep banging on about this because that's the kind of decision making that we sadly grew used to under the previous general manager's regime. The kind of lazy thinking that led us to the current sorry state of affairs in terms of competitiveness. You're always going to have isolated personnel decisions that miss the mark. I certainly am old and jaded enough to know that and take it into account. But this one? God help me, I can't let it go because I just don't buy the excuses for why a mistake this big got made. The added indignity that the guy came out of our owner's own OHL feeder makes it even worse. If ever there was a guy who should have been scouted within an inch of his life it's this guy. And we let one good week's worth of games over-ride years and years worth of exposure. Thanks.
And make no mistake. This club MIGHT have actually screwed around and make the playoffs this season if they had three halfway decent defense pairings over the last few weeks. You can bury one of the two AHLers in the mix, but not two. That's a pretty expensive scouting and management failure.
And at this point, I'm going to be done blathering about this player.
