Some parts of that regular season were ugly. After the season ended someone in management admitted there were two different games that season where they had agreed on Trotz being fired if we lost, but both of them set off brief winning streaks. One of them was a game against the wild, I forget who the other game was against. (Pretty sure Trotz himself was not informed about the specific games until after the run, but he was undoubtedly aware that he was on the hot seat.)
In a season where he played in the all-star game and won sixteen games in the postseason, Holtby was pretty regularly bad and there really wasn’t much controversy that Grubauer had won the starting job for the playoffs. Brooks Orpik played like shit basically every game for an enormously long stretch. I was genuinely frustrated that DSP had a roster spot game one because I felt like he had provided essentially no benefit through the regular season, which is yet another piece of evidence that it’s not just an unhappy accident that NHL teams choose not to reach out to me to request my insight.
I also remember thinking it was the worst preseason I had ever seen from the team by miles, and I don’t think they’ve come close to matching that since then either.