General Manager Ron Francis meets with the media following Friday’s busy NHL trade deadline to discuss the Kraken’s moves and the goals of the franchise.
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10 Comments
Can’t wait for this guy to be gone
What a bone head!
Good trades, needed to happen
Great moves Ron! We were going to lose Yanni and Turbo for nothing, now we have tons of picks to work with!
Was hoping Ron was going to be part of one of these trades. Guess we have to wait for the off season to see him get the boot. Kraken are just like the Hurricanes were when Ronnie terrorized that franchise. The team can’t move forward with Ron at the helm.
Honestly hope to see this Seattle franchise start winning and more frequently into the playoffs
Some people’s expectations are ridiculous – it’s a barely four year old expansion team who already made the playoffs once (most expansion teams don’t for quite a while), yet they want Ron fired 😂
Blah, blah, blah 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
Ron is doing a great job, but trading those picks would be foolish. If we start blowing assets to bring in mediocre talent it dooms the franchise to a decade of mediocrity. Stay the course Ron, every great team builds through the draft. Draft your foundation, trade for a few missing pieces when you hit your window. People who are criticizing the work he has done don't realize how little value our assets have because the team is still so new and the farm system is still growing. Want to know what it looks like when you get desperate and bring in whatever you can get? Stephenson, you overpay and hand out an 8 year contract to a guy like Stephenson. You can only make a mistake like that so many times before your team is handcuffed to the wrong guys for 6-8 years. Or worse yet you end up like Nashville, they brought in big names, paid them big money! Look how that has worked out for them this season…..
McDavid, Draisaitl, Kucherov, Mathews, Makar, Conner, Pastrnak….The list goes on and on, this is the kind of top tier star talent the Kraken need to be relevant and you only get it through the draft, teams very rarely let superstars walk and when they do they head straight for contenders (with lots of home grown talent). If you manage to trade for one you leverage your future and you better have a strong core or its all for nothing.
Either consider us 4 years into a rebuild with 3 years of amazing assets to work with, or consider us "retooling" and in 4-5 years we will be trading our current young core to start a proper rebuild and be looking like the Sharks or the Ducks. I would rather stay the course and work towards a contender personally rather than battling for a wild card spot and be a first round out every season. Trust me I'm a Blazers fan, its a painful experience when your biggest aspiration is to be a high seeded teams first round warm up, year after year, decade after decade…
Honestly Ron's goals are just a bit more ambitious than the owners it seems. They want to make the playoffs to increase revenue and generate buzz before Seattle gets a new NBA team, its selfish and short sighted because you know what people love? Champions. Ron wants to build a contender which is only done through the draft. His asset management has been amazing. Scooping up guys like Kakko and Tolvanen for next to or literally nothing. Getting Bjorkstrand for a 3rd and 4th round pick and basically flipping him for a 1st a few years later. With the exception of Stephenson he has managed the cap extremely well, in fact I would say Stephenson is the result of ownership putting pressure on him to win now and it caused an unforced error. He sat down for 1 game with Shane Wright in the press box when he was scratched this year and I don't know what he said, but Shane went from 5 points in 20 games before that talk, to 32 points in 39 games after. He seems to understand development, his scouting team has been finding amazing talent in both the first and second rounds of the draft.
All I see is win after win after win. We have a solid young core of two way centers, a budding superstar still in junior, the AHL's top goal scoring rookie, a farm team already a constant contender for the Calder Cup (which vastly helps with developing youth) and 10 picks in the first 2 rounds over the next 3 years. All I see personally is the same guy who made the Hurricanes relevant again and in the conversation for eastern conference finals every year. He built that team up the right way and paid the price with his job (and don't tell me it was his replacement because the Rantanen trade only to lose him after 6 home games is one of the worst bits of business I've ever seen, they basically got the same return for Rantanen that Ron got for Gourde and Bjorkstrand). I respect the hell out of him because he cares more about the franchise than he does about keeping his position. He seems dedicated to doing what works, even if he knows ownership is more interested in money now than winning a cup 6-8 years down the road.