You can say everyone's evaluation is flawed based on incomplete information. Some posters here talk about the process and conclude it's a bad trade based on their own perceived notions of value. They know very little of the process yet they push their conclusions as if it's conclusive rather than speculative. But it's easier to see the results.
This is a results oriented business. At some point you got to say that a team won the trade based on the results like Brian Burke admitted that Boston won the Kessel trade.
Speaking of Brian Burke, the story of how the Canucks ended up drafting the Sedins have been rehashed. Burke could have ended up making all those moves without ending up with the Sedins. I don't see anyone here complaining about "the process".
Again, the facts are the Canucks have targeted Pouliot for a while. Benning came of and said that he think it's worth the gamble. Some posters here equate their disagreement with the process" with management incompetence. They clearly saw something in Pouliot that they believe was worth the assets given up. There has been zero evidence provided that this management treat didn't evaluate the trade fully before making the deal.
You're projecting a lot of things that you don't like about specific arguments that have nothing to do with the truth of my comment that you're responding to. I'm not defending how absolutely people treat their opinions about trades like infallible fact.
However, I often hear this line of reasoning favoring looking purely at results in a trade and I don't think it holds up.
First, we should be able to agree that in a perfect world where we know the motivations and circumstances of every trade, the conditions and reasoning behind a trade are equally important as the net outcome. We know that this is true by looking at unambiguous extreme cases-- It would not be a a good trade to give up a highly touted blue-chip first rounder w/ little reason for concern for Michael Chaput, even if the outcome is that Chaput plays NHL games and the 1st rounder busts. Both are massively important factors. To determine whether a trade is good or not, it's naturally a tug-of-war between the two.
In reality, we don't have full access to all of this information, true. The outcome of the trade is objectively undeniable (well, assuming that our eye tests and ability to assess stats agree), true. We can know some things about the conditions of the trade, but we can't know everything, which means that we can never be 100% certain/accurate about its effect, true. So it's just a question of what we do with this information.
It doesn't make sense to say "Well, we can't be 100% certain about the circumstances/reasoning behind the trade, so lets throw it out of consideration" or "Well, the outcome is the only thing we're certain about, so let's assume that its correlation with a good trade is 100%." It also makes no sense to suggest that we know NOTHING about the circumstances of the trade, there's no precedence, and that any reasoning we apply regarding it might as well be random.
It makes a lot more sense to acknowledge the importance of both factors, accept the outcome's undeniable impact on the trade, approximate the conditions and reasoning behind the trade as best as we can, have an opinion about it that can be scrutinized, and understand that our final conclusion cannot be absolute and is always going to be an opinion (some more valid than others). This is true whether we lean harder towards believing the objective outcome's leanings or not. The outcome doesn't transform into a bigger piece of what makes up a good trade just because it's the portion that happens to be unambiguous. Any opinion that suggests that it tells the full story is fundamentally broken.
And the fact that it's a results-oriented business isn't a reason to draw conclusions in the manner that doesn't make sense over a manner that does.
