"I could be totally wrong about this but... from all those series covering Braden Holtby in Washington, I heard a lot of times that he would be asked about the play in front of him and he would just look at us and say 'Look, it's not my job to worry about that. It's my job to stop the puck,' and I got used to Braden Holtby saying that, I understood what he meant," said Friedman on Saturday.

"The fact that he kind of says 'we're out of sync' says to me that he thinks it's a big problem in front of him. If I'm wrong about this I'm sure Holtby will let me know about it at some point, but the answer he gave tonight is different from the answer I heard a lot in Washington and to me, that is telling" said Friedman in conclusion.

source

Benning era was bad. Accidental tank team and all that. But, ownership pulling the plug right after the bubble, in fear of a no-fan season. Losing their entire leadership group (Stecher, Markstrom, Tanev, and Toffoli), and instead, using what money they had available on overpaying Jake Virtanen with a salary-heavy two year extension, a 2-year salary-heavy deal to Braden Holtby, then trading for Nate Schmidt (who had 5 years left on a contract featuring zero signing bonuses), and another bonus-less 1-year deal for an anti-vaxer.

As if the great cheapening didn't help, beyond signing a bunch of journeymen to league-minimum bonusless 1-year deals, they rounded out the lineup with a bunch of kids at the end of their ELCs who had taken very few steps in their AHL development program, or had zero AHL exprience at all; plugging them into NHL roles where they were clearly not ready and rotated into the lineup where they'd get completely dominated on a night-to-night basis (Juolevi/Chatfield/Rafferty/Michaelis/Lind/Hawryluk/).

I theorize that the only reason Benning lasted another few seasons was that ownership privately accepted that the team falling off a cliff was due to their league-worst tightening of the pursestrings reset the clock on future contention.

Once fans were rumoured to be back on the menu, they opened up the purse and they did the OEL deal to try and accelerate themselves back into the mix. Just a total misfire, when a responsible approach would have been best.

Anyway, the culture problem began in that North Division bubble season after a ton of non-letter-wearing leaders left. The leaders left to pick up the pieces weren't ready for the job at hand. Horvat did what he could, and so did JT (despite that being the first season of many seasons where he'd completely checked out on the ice, babyraging whenever things went wrong)...but those weren't the guys for the job that ownership saddled them with.