I'll set a calendar reminder for the end of the season for you to quote this post again.
Trouba is having a historically career-low season for an also historically bonkers NYR team in which
every single player on their team is below the NHL average in Corsi for and against. Like, it's so bad it's nearly
approaching Buffalo/Toronto tanking levels bad - but they're still above 0.500 in terms of points% on the backs of Panarin and Buchnevic scoring nearly double their expected goals thus far and everyone else being somewhat even. Perhaps there is something to be said to the systems of the Rangers and that
Lindy Ruff might not be a mastermind at defense. Of course, Micah did show that perhaps Trouba was being carried by his teammates
as his isolated impact wasn't pretty in terms of defensive coverage - but to your point above, he was being sold as a top pairing defenseman in which returns have traditionally been more than a 1st round pick and a defenceman who largely had struggled in a season-and-a-half bit of play.
Hindsight is 20/20 - just because
we landed on Heinola when the likes of Lassi Thomson, Tobias Bjornfot, and Simon Holmstrom were also being taken in that range, and that Heinola has shown that he already has some chops to play at the NHL level today, doesn't mean it's a foregone conclusion that Heinola becomes a top-pairing defenceman in the future, just like we shouldn't be assuming that Trouba (and Morrissey for that matter) are going to be this historically bad for the rest of their career, just as we also shouldn't assume that Pionk is going to be historically this good (or better) for the rest of his career.
Pionk has been a pleasant surprise to the start of the season, and has in fact been
the best Jets defender this season in terms of game score (EDIT: I mean, having an average game score of 0.16 kind of tells you some other things about the team and him as a whole when that's good for 139th out of 270 defenseman with at least 5 games played). In terms of RAPMs, I'm glad that over the course of 1/5th his previous playing time,
he might not truly be a standard deviation below all defenders in all significant categories in the NHL, and is more along the lines and thoughts of what you
did read in the earlier posts in this thread: a defender who might be able to drive some offense but at the cost of defense. I still don't think that's worth much in terms of surplus value of his $3m x 2 year contract when Niku could probably do the same thing if the team ever figures out what they truly want from him (in that they forgive Pionk and the veterans for their defensive miscues but staple him to the bench for the same thing).
We're 18 games into the season and this team is barely getting by on Hellebuyck being very good in net thus far masking some of the
atrocious defending in front of him. God forbid Hellebuyck gets injured and Brossoit continues playing just-average or below-average as it might expose some not good things about this team that we routinely forget when we always rely on what we see and remember.