A nice write-up by TSN's more statistically "woke" analyst:
http://www.tsn.ca/statistically-speaking-capitals-land-prized-puck-mover-shattenkirk-1.683261
Couple of things to say here:
First off, I feel people are missing the point that we didn't look towards a pure futures trade until relatively late in the season. We were clearly NOT interested in a pure futures trade at the draft, which would have been the best time to ask for such a trade, or during the season until it became clear no one would offer Shattenkirk an extension he felt comfortable taking. DA still clearly thought we were a contender going into this year, which is hard to understand since he himself mentioned taking a step back to take two steps forward during the off-season. It seems that once again, he wasn't sure WTH he was doing in terms of a vision. Was this a retool year? If so, you take the best
DEAL for Shatty at the draft, extracting maximum value whether it's futures or a combo of hockey trade/futures and go into this year giving Parayko a larger role, and potentially a new contract. If not, you try and figure out a way to replace the top 6 Center hole left by Backes leaving in UFA. DA did neither, and guess what? Here we are not contending and also getting a meh return on the top trade chip we've had in quite some time.
Second, the Shatty contract. The contract was brutal from the day it was signed, and not simply because of the comparable to Voynov. Shattenkirk was in the literal exact same position we are in with Parayko now. We had 3 years of team control left, and we signed him to a 4 year deal, only getting 1 year of UFA out of it. How many people here would accept us signing Parayko to a 4 year deal? Because that's exactly what we did with Shattenkirk. And if you think we couldn't have signed him longer due to money or term, that's just silly. How would it fly if DA said, "Well since we just signed Berglund to a new 5 year deal, we can only afford to get Parayko on a 4 year deal due to the AAV he wanted was too high for us to afford on a longer term contract." This place would melt down.
Why are the Hawks so successful? Because they lock up their top talent and THEN worry about the filler. And if they find out they overpaid on filler, they dump it the second they can, even if it means giving up something else of value to do so.
The entire Shattenkirk situation was mismanaged as far back as 4 years ago. The contract was bad. The fact that DA couldn't make a choice between retool and contending for this year was bad. The fact that we didn't seem to know exactly what kind of contract demands Shatty would agree to so we could sign and trade him seems bad. I'm glad that Armstrong was asking for players like Hall and Drouin, but it should have been a pretty simply convo. This is what Shatty wants for a contract, if you're willing to meet that price, we can do business. If that's too rich for you, then it's not really worth our time continuing this line of conversation.