I feel this way about it. If you go back historically and look at some comparables, it might help contextually. I have said before that Slavin's trajectory reminds me a lot of Duncan Keith. The play styles are very similar, but Keith likely has more offense in his prime than Slavin will. All in all, it seems close to me. When you think about elite goal scoring wingers like Laine projects to be, it's tougher to manufacture comparables. Era adjusted, maybe Rick Nash? 41 goals at 19. Laine is a pure shooter and scorer, but his playmaking leaves something to be desired. The Kovalchuk comparisons to me just seem offbase. Kovalchuk as a rookie was just absolute electricity. Laine is an absolute beast, but Kovalchuk was really something else entirely. Even still, if you use Nash as a bottom end and Kovalchuk as a higher end and compare their impact as relative to a guy like Keith, you can see how the positional longevity of defensemen lends itself to higher valuation. With rare exception, goal scoring wingers just simply don't age well. Unless you consider Laine to be Ovechkin 2.0 or even Kovalchuk 2.0, then maybe you consider it because the prime impact will be so immense that you'll take 8 years of it over the 12 you'll probably get from the defenseman. The narrative seems to be that people always believe that production from 18 year old players will be only a portion of what they bring in their prime and as such the expectations for Laine might already be unrealistic. Jeff Skinner was an example. The 30 goal and 60 point version of Skinner had some of us expecting Crosby type production once he was 22 or 23, but it turns out that version of the player was almost as good as he was going to get.
Would it be worth thinking about if Winnipeg dangled Laine for Slavin? God, yes. But would it be a slam dunk that this trade would be long term good for us? Debatable.
