Okay, ow. Unnecessary.
The thing that I don't like is that... You're talking to me as if I was a Pioli hater from the start. I was a huge believer in Pioli before. I praised him to high heavens for what he did here, to the point of ridicule here.
Fine, let's say that all the players are bad. CDK is bad. Vranckx is bad. Adli. All of them (except Thiaw) are bad. Great. Let's assume that, now, two questions:
(1) does one bad transfer market justifies Pioli having this bad a season? And (2) Does it justify him being out-performed by Lazio, who had far less resources than he did?
There are countless metrics that Pioli has failed at, from before, in particular his athletic training staff, where Milan was consistently the most injured side, which harms his ability to even use players, but again, my view is: if you had to fire one of them, then I think Pioli should have been the guy, because I don't think he was dealt enough of a transfer blow to justify his Serie A performances.
But let's go back to this: if Thiaw was the only good player, why did it take until 2023 to play him? If Pioli was so burdened by bad players, why did it take an injury crisis for him to finally play Thiaw? CDK didn't seem to need an integration period, he was played from the start.
I'm not "clamoring" over players, I'm not a CDK defender, lol. But CDK was a Moncada pick, and Moncada is the one who is now in charge. Adli, probably a Moncada pick. So... I just don't get how you can excuse so many systematic failures of Pioli's reign and boil down Maldini's evaluation one transfer market, when Pioli gets an entire season to succeed or fail. And he finished being Lazio.
Every SD who has ever lived has had a stinker for a transfer market. And maybe Pioli just had a bad year this year? Okay, fine. But if you're going to say "give Pioli the benefit of the doubt" then... why doesn't that extend to Maldini? All the superlatives you use on Pioli could equally be used for Maldini, as would the "benefit of the doubt earned" quotient that you give Pioli.
The metric we are judging is not whether we sustained a title charge, because we didn't. As you pointed out, we did stay close to Napoli, and then faded. Why? Injuries played a big part, right? Again, Pioli finished behind Lazio. A team with less resources, less quality, and worse players. How is that the fault of Maldini that Pioli doesn't know how to beat relegation teams?