Quote:
Originally Posted by Cecil Terwilliger
Not sure if this has been mentioned.
I see a lot of people mentioning Treliving potentially taking blame or heat for trading picks, meaning that he thought we were a contender and he shouldn't have traded them if we weren't.
But who says that has to payoff right now? Is our roster going to be vastly different next year? Maybe trading the picks was done because the move could payoff over several seasons, not just this year, and he knew that if he waited that the opportunity to improve our team would be gone. It's not like he could guarantee that the same, or even similar, players with similar contracts would be available at the price he wanted to pay when we are contenders.
Had he been trading for pending UFAs and late season rentals like Sutter always did and we still failed then I get it.
Hopefully worst case scenario is he traded a pick outside the top 10 and he knew there was a chance that he wasn't trading the 25th overall pick but thought that the trades still made sense because they could payoff over multiple seasons, even if we didn't contend this year.
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Firstly. the lottery odds mean that any team that misses the playoffs has a chance of picking top 3. Last year the Flyers were 19th in the NHL, and won 2nd overall. The Stars were 24th in the NHL, and won 3rd overall. The season prior, the Jets were 23rd in the NHL, and won 2nd overall. Treliving's Hamonic trade has no contingency in place for this.
And even outside of that, the quality of player available in the 17th to 22nd-ish place zone should not be ignored. We lost our chance to draft Vladimir Tarasenko making a bad trade of this sort many years ago. We lost our chance to draft Brock Boeser, Matthew Barzal, or Kyle Connor when we traded our 15th overall pick for Dougie Hamilton.
In fact, not including the above four players, here are some players picked in past 10th in the first round of the last decade of drafts:
Erik Karlsson
Jordan Eberle
Jake Gardiner
Ryan Ellis
Nick Leddy
Chris Kreider
Cam Fowler
Jaden Shwartz
Oscar Klefbom
Kevin Hayes
Andrei Vasilveskiy
Filip Forsberg
Tomas Hertl
Teuvo Teravainen
Radek Faksa
Alexander Wennberg
Anthony Mantha
Dylan Larkin
David Pastrnak
Josh Ho-Sang
Charlie McAvoy
Not only do we not know where we would have drafted, we don't know who we could have drafted. Not knowing this, it was irresponsible to trade that pick for Travis Hamonic, who at best is a #4 defenseman and really has barely even played like one in a couple years.
As it stands, we have no draft pick in the first round. All for a trade that was questionable the day it was made.
I'm personally fed up with this organization botching first round after first round of the draft and expecting to go far.
This is a team sitting 19th in points percentage that has no first round draft pick. That is simple unacceptable and no one should get out Scott Free. Last time this happened, one Sutter lost a job but we had to suffer through three more years of the worse Sutter. You gotta clean house fully. Especially when you have pieces like TJ Brodie, Sam Bennett, and Johnny Gaudreau all of whom have shown elite potential and it's being pissed away at both an individual and team level. Brodie should be a top 10 defenseman in the league, where he's currently not looking like a top 10 defenseman in the Pacific. Johnny should be dangerous on a nightly basis, but he pretty much has been hot-and-cold since Gulutzan took over. Bennett should be a top two line center given opportunity to overwhelmingly succeed, instead he's our 3rd line left wing.