Karl Eriksson
Boring!
At the time of the trade, Karlsson was a franchise player who had question marks because of previous injuries. He was a year removed from one of the greatest playoff runs a single player has had in this current era of hockey. After that run, it was established that there was Crosby, McDavid, and Karlsson as the top 3 players in the league.
San Jose got Karlsson for as cheap (at the time) as they did for two reasons:
1) Teams were afraid to pay for Karlsson after a bad season where he looked to have had issues from his previous injury.
2) In response to Karlsson claiming he'd "get what he's worth", Dorion and co botched the handling of the Karlsson trade and turned it into a public soap opera that made it abundantly clear that Karlsson wasn't going to stay. They only sidetracked after the deadline with the weird "We'll offer him a contract on July 1st because we totally can't talk about a contract before then or else Ottawa Radio guys have to pay the NHLPA fine for us even know multiple credible people like Pierre Lebrun have consulted with Bill Daly and confirmed that we can in fact discuss a contract with Erik Karlsson prior to July 1st".
Our prospects from the deal are getting way overrated. Well, at least in relation to Karlsson's upside at the time of the trade.
Could Balcers and Norris be strong 2nd or 3rd line forwards that help contribute to the next re-iteration of this team? Sure. How difficult is it to find 2nd or 3rd line forwards in a cap league where teams can only spend so much, which forces talent redistribution? It's not easy, but it's not that hard compared to finding a franchise defender who can play nearly 30 minutes a night and produce at a level from the backend not seen in decades.
The most impressive aspect of the trade was the double unprotected pick. It was the only realistic thing in the trade that would sufficiently hurt San Jose and allow the Senators an opportunity to "win" the Karlsson trade. No other team could provide the Senators the opportunity to have two cracks at a team missing the playoffs. Only because San Jose already dealt a protected 1st rounder to Buffalo was this opportunity available.
Ultimately, if San Jose finishes 2nd from the bottom, it looks like Dorion is going to end up with one of the most valuable packages any player has garnered in the cap era. That mostly rests on the value of the San Jose pick. If you want to purely judge by results, Dorion is a genius. If you want to judge by process, there were a lot of mis-steps along the way.
The trade was a perfectly fine gamble for San Jose to take. Back in the summer o 2018, it was not reasonable to predict that San Jose would be this bad in 2020. Miss the playoffs? Sure. Finish low enough to get the Senators a top 5 or 6 pick before even considering the lottery? No.
Karlsson was playing like a franchise player for San Jose for a big chunk of last season. That's the part that is missed in the narrative here when people evaluate the trade and re-signing from San Jose's point of view.
San Jose's gamble with the trade was reasonable. The re-signing was a bigger gamble, but it's very difficult to walk away from a player who has the potential to play the way Karlsson did for chunks of last year with San Jose. When a team is bad, usually, everybody looks bad. It's way too early to call Karlsson Wade Redden.
Intra-team spousal cyber bullying didn’t help the trade either.
