People having a go a Bownsy need their heads checked.
Is he the best keeper in the league? - probably not.
Is he in the top 2/3? - 100% in my view
Building a team and squad is not as simple as cherry picking the best players from around the league as there are numerous factors to balance. Wages, ice time demands, families, age, fitness, injuries, accommodation etc. you can't have 22 Joey Martins and expect to win the league.
We've gone down the route of a GB net minder with Bowns which gives us another import slot. Makes sense to me. The problem has come from filling those import slots wisely.
I believe we would have won the league at a canter with Tyson Strachan still here. We didn't have a big, stay at home D man that calmed everything down. Tyson gave you an 8/10 performance every single game. that's what years in the NHL gets you; proven quality and very few (if any) mistakes.
By all accounts there seems to have been a lot of shennanigans going on behind the scenes this year. For one, lots of comments on the Lord / Faryna bust up in the CHL from so many different sources. If this and others are true, it's a brilliant performance to get as close as we did.
Not confident about the play offs but that could just be my bitter disappointment and deflation.
However, very much looking forward to where we go from here. Think we could see a fair few changes this summer; retirements and replacements combined. I'm really excited at what road the club takes from here.