He left on really bad terms due to a disagreement with the Meruelos.
Which, given what we now know about how the Meruelos operate, provides some context in hindsight to what kind of BS may have been happening behind the scenes.
I think the main things he’s criticized for are mostly things that were very justifiable at the time.
Like the Hall trade, which he made when the team was leading the Pacific division, and partly because ownership (again, Meruelos) pushed him very hard to make a deal like that. Was it a steep price? Sure. But it was Christmas, we had the best goalie in the league statistically, leading our division, it was exactly the kind of circumstances where you can see a decent playoff run happening. Chayka couldn’t control Kuemper getting injured at the worst time. He couldn’t control the rest of the team that wasn’t Hall seeing their offense evaporate as soon as Hall showed up.
At the time of the Hall trade, the leading narrative was “yes it’s a steep price, but it will be worth it if he re-signs with us in the off-season”. And that felt like a very real possibility at the time of the trade. And then everything went to shit, the pandemic happened, we barely limped into the special pandemic playoffs, and after beating NSH in the play-in got quickly sent home by COL.
The Kessel trade also gets criticized often, but if you look at the pieces given up for him, none of them have really turned into that much either.
And then there’s the scouting scandal, which I won’t try to defend because it’s obviously not okay. And weird. Asking prospects to wear shorts to their interviews so you can try to gauge the size and shape of their leg muscles and try to gain an information advantage that way is just weird. And I have trouble believing that it ever had even an outside chance of actually providing useful information about the prospects.
But let’s be honest, losing two first round picks as a penalty was absolutely ridiculous. Seriously? That’s the penalty for a rogue trainer attempting to gain info about leg circumference through a stupid scheme that almost certainly never had any chance of even working? Meanwhile, what was Chicago’s penalty for illegally covering up a rape, for the explicit reason of gaining an advantage in the playoffs and winning the Cup? How many first round picks did they lose?
Meanwhile, Chayka has a lot of very solid draft finds and landed a bunch of great players via trade as well. Chychrun and Keller were his first official draft picks, and the year prior Garland was an excellent pick of his he got to make as AGM. The trade deal to acquire Kuemper was insanely good, but even better was re-signing Kuemper to a cheap deal with term, which made him an extremely valuable trade asset. The reason Kuemper commanded a first round pick as a return wasn’t just because he was good. It was because his AAV was tiny compared to his value.
I think Chayka had a lot of wins, and definitely some misses too. But to say he was a disaster from start to finish is revisionist history. He absolutely left the franchise in a better place than it was when he took the helm. And that’s despite the absolutely ridiculous over-punishment for the scouting violations.
And as unprofessional as his exit seemed at the time, we don’t know what happened behind closed doors, and I’d bet anything that the reason it all went down the way it did was because of Meruelo’s shenanigans. Not Chayka.
Honestly, in the beginning I was hyped, he draft Keller and chychrun in 2016 and all we kept hearing was that “the coyotes are going to be scary next year”. At the time little did i know he was doing shading things behind the scenes and went all in on the hall trade and gave too much away.
Should have hired his sister. The brains of the op.
Weirdly I was thinking about this collosal dipshit yesterday. One thing I’m ‘glad’ about out of the whole “Trying to care about the Coyotes only to get yeeted out of our hobby” thing, was that this imposter never got another job and has now been relegated to managing a bunch of Wendy’s locations.
I guess the only thing about him that keeps me up at night is that he’s proof that sometimes people who think they’ve got imposter syndrome are actually imposters.
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nobody
Nope
He left on really bad terms due to a disagreement with the Meruelos.
Which, given what we now know about how the Meruelos operate, provides some context in hindsight to what kind of BS may have been happening behind the scenes.
I think the main things he’s criticized for are mostly things that were very justifiable at the time.
Like the Hall trade, which he made when the team was leading the Pacific division, and partly because ownership (again, Meruelos) pushed him very hard to make a deal like that. Was it a steep price? Sure. But it was Christmas, we had the best goalie in the league statistically, leading our division, it was exactly the kind of circumstances where you can see a decent playoff run happening. Chayka couldn’t control Kuemper getting injured at the worst time. He couldn’t control the rest of the team that wasn’t Hall seeing their offense evaporate as soon as Hall showed up.
At the time of the Hall trade, the leading narrative was “yes it’s a steep price, but it will be worth it if he re-signs with us in the off-season”. And that felt like a very real possibility at the time of the trade. And then everything went to shit, the pandemic happened, we barely limped into the special pandemic playoffs, and after beating NSH in the play-in got quickly sent home by COL.
The Kessel trade also gets criticized often, but if you look at the pieces given up for him, none of them have really turned into that much either.
And then there’s the scouting scandal, which I won’t try to defend because it’s obviously not okay. And weird. Asking prospects to wear shorts to their interviews so you can try to gauge the size and shape of their leg muscles and try to gain an information advantage that way is just weird. And I have trouble believing that it ever had even an outside chance of actually providing useful information about the prospects.
But let’s be honest, losing two first round picks as a penalty was absolutely ridiculous. Seriously? That’s the penalty for a rogue trainer attempting to gain info about leg circumference through a stupid scheme that almost certainly never had any chance of even working? Meanwhile, what was Chicago’s penalty for illegally covering up a rape, for the explicit reason of gaining an advantage in the playoffs and winning the Cup? How many first round picks did they lose?
Meanwhile, Chayka has a lot of very solid draft finds and landed a bunch of great players via trade as well. Chychrun and Keller were his first official draft picks, and the year prior Garland was an excellent pick of his he got to make as AGM. The trade deal to acquire Kuemper was insanely good, but even better was re-signing Kuemper to a cheap deal with term, which made him an extremely valuable trade asset. The reason Kuemper commanded a first round pick as a return wasn’t just because he was good. It was because his AAV was tiny compared to his value.
I think Chayka had a lot of wins, and definitely some misses too. But to say he was a disaster from start to finish is revisionist history. He absolutely left the franchise in a better place than it was when he took the helm. And that’s despite the absolutely ridiculous over-punishment for the scouting violations.
And as unprofessional as his exit seemed at the time, we don’t know what happened behind closed doors, and I’d bet anything that the reason it all went down the way it did was because of Meruelo’s shenanigans. Not Chayka.
Honestly, in the beginning I was hyped, he draft Keller and chychrun in 2016 and all we kept hearing was that “the coyotes are going to be scary next year”. At the time little did i know he was doing shading things behind the scenes and went all in on the hall trade and gave too much away.
Should have hired his sister. The brains of the op.
Weirdly I was thinking about this collosal dipshit yesterday. One thing I’m ‘glad’ about out of the whole “Trying to care about the Coyotes only to get yeeted out of our hobby” thing, was that this imposter never got another job and has now been relegated to managing a bunch of Wendy’s locations.
I guess the only thing about him that keeps me up at night is that he’s proof that sometimes people who think they’ve got imposter syndrome are actually imposters.
Oof! Relax
Everyone at the time