Great post.Using this season as the example of "Claude won't play young players" is absolutely absurd and immediately disqualifies your point of view on anything in my mind.
Spooner, Vatrano, Pastrnak, Ferraro, Connolly (who's younger than Spooner), Acciari....all got significant playing time, and at the expense of veterans. Those guys showed flashes of talent but also disappeared for long stretches and proved they weren't enough to get them to where they need to go, yet.
On defense, Morrow and Trotman have proven they are not NHL caliber defensemen (right now) and the organization, not Claude, decided to bury Colin Miller in the AHL.
This isn't like he went down with the ship riding the likes of Paille, Campbell, and Thornton. He played the young guys. And the team scored a lot of goals, couldn't defend worth shit, and showed minimal leadership and consistency throughout the season.
This team desperately missed Chris Kelly, and I'm not joking. He would have given you more than Spooner did in the last month and at least tried to not let them sleepwalk through these games. The fact that people are still staying "MOAR YOUNG KIDS" without realizing that playing them comes at a cost doesn't make sense to me.
All that said, Seidenberg, K Miller, and McQuaid gotta go and they gotta find replacements for them that aren't in the system now. It's 3 bottom pairing defensemen getting top 4 mins.
This is the only reason I think there's a chance that Julien keeps his job. If Cam/Sweeney are halfway competent they realize that Claude was strapped with a shitty defense and a lot of kids and was one game away from the playoffs.
They failed to improve the team at the deadline when they were clearly in need of some help and well within the playoff picture. This falls squarely on Sweeney and Cam. Julien deserves recognition, not scorn.