OT: Ken Holland: next GM of the Edmonton Oilers?

You are mostly correct expect the part about letting Babcock walk.  Babcock is getting 6.25M per season in Toronto.  He was offered a significant raise from his previous 2M per season.  There was no way the Wings should have matched that amount, especially with the team we have.  No coach is saving the Wings for at least another couple years.  They have massive holes to fill and contracts to shed.  

I don't think Babcock is that good of a coach.  He consistently plays his 3rd and 4th lines too much in crunch time.  That's what inhibits the teams he coaches to catch up when they get behind.  That's why they've lost 7-game series 2 years in a row.  For the amount of money he is paid, he underachieves.

Blashill walked into an impossible situation, but hasn't done himself any favors by playing the aging players more than he should and not giving AA enough minutes, but unless Scotty Bowman himself was the coach of the wings, this decline was inevitable.

Apparently they're not alone, the Ilitch family thinks so too.

True, but Edmonton has also had great young talent for years at this point and it's never amounted to anything. He did a great job with the Wings, but when he became the GM in 1998, he was handed a much much much much better situation than Edmonton is in currently.

Not taking anything away from Holland, but saying that it's probably too risky and stressful to try this at this stage in his career.

Crosby doesn’t play for the oilers 

...and none of those guys have won a single play-off game. In the end, I hope you're proven right, but I think it's a bit rash to be giving credit before it's been earned. I know it's the current style to reward potential, but it's not my thing.

Rasmusssen is not. He seems like a good kid but his ceiling is fourth line center or 2nd/3rd line AHL. Holland reached way too high. I don’t care how other GMs rated him, it was clear he has low skill, low IQ, and a below average skater who does not use his size at all other than on screens. 

Ok, Kenny didn't leave the cupboard totally bare.  I was just irked by the, "Hey I'll sign my fishin buddies to overpriced long term contracts with no trade clauses!"  In the cap era ya gotta be ruthless (unfortunately).  Stevie Y traded LeCavalier and St. Louis without a second  thought even though they won a cup with Tampa Bay.  I'm confident The Captain will not only right the ship, but do it like a MUTHAFUKIN SUPERBOSS!

Huh, I hadn’t thought of this. Ilitch was a great owner, but it is certainly true that he put a lot of pressure on the Tigers front office to act against their better judgment in pursuit of a title before he died. I’m fine with that, but Dombrowski DID manage to build a title-winner elsewhere and it was a cost. 

So if ownership was influencing Holland to piece together a competitive team, that does help explain some of the bad choices. 

Not all of them, though. Holland seems ill-suited to being a GM in the cap era with such widespread European scouting. Gone are the days that the Wings could strike on under-the-radar prospects like Datsyuk and Zetterberg to build the core of a Cup team. 

The stars teams build winners around today are guys you find at the top of the draft, and Holland has neither drafted there nor done a particularly good job identifying cheap but useful talent to assemble a team that can compete without such stars. 

But if you think about it, weren't they right?

The teams that won the cup the last few years weren't the young teams with the next generation of talent, they were the old grizzly vets who knew how to win playoff games. The Wings actually had a better chance with their vets than they would've with an "overhaul".

Sure, they failed spectacularly but it was the smart play.