I think people are resorting to taking the emotion out of the trade. Everyone was stir-crazy for two hours yesterday with anticipation. People heard we traded Forsberg and flipped. I know I did.
If you follow the Redskins, same exact thing happened with the RGIII trade. You hear 3 1st round picks and immeadiately flip out/call for ShanAllen's head/curse Snyder/scream/yell/piss and moan. When the dust settled, people said, "we have an opportunity to have something here we haven't had in 20 years; a franchise QB" and came around to the trade. I'd do the RGIII trade again without hesitation.
Not saying Erat = RGIII, at all. But, the fact remains that the Caps have been building something for almost 10 years now since they draft Backstrom and Ovechkin. McPhee has Wilson and Kuz in the pipeline and felt Forsberg was: (a) expendable and (b) not as good as HF posters want to believe.
A lot of people are angry saying if he would have just re-signed Semin or re-signed another scorer we could have shored up our top 2 lines without giving up our 2nd best prospect. Other people are angry because we didn't shore up the defense. Other people are angry because now our cap space is limited and if George can't resign Ribeiro then this trade is a complete failure. All valid points.
If Erat gives us 2+ years at 70-80 points and if Latta can be an effective 3C then as long as FF isn't a bonafide star for the next 10+ years then this trade can be win-win. Bottom line, the Caps are better today than they were yesterday while their division rivals aren't any better, and may or may not be worse off in 5 years because of the trade.
I'm gonna nit-pick, and it's not going to be on what you necessarily think. I know people freak out over trades. But those that are obsessed enough to post on a prospects board are a different breed of fans. Same way I reacted to Shanny's decision making at QB. In '10 when he got McNabb I bashed it, arguing McNabb was in severe decline, and you could see it if you paid attention to his career arc, I believed the decline was masked his final year in philly by the addition of weapons philly lacked throughout his career (2 legit WR's instead of 0, in Jackson and Maclin, great TE, great RB in Shady), once he moved to team with even less weapons than the eagles had early in his career, his scattershot arm, and physical decline would be evident again. They were. Shanny missed on that badly, and dealing a 2nd and a 4th rounder from a team that had no picks for a decade, was a crazy stupid idea when you were a rebuilding team, even if you needed a bridge QB (should have gotten a hasselsuck type instead). However where he was quite prescient was at drafting a QB. Here's what he did:
'10-Only liked Bradford, price was way too high, so got his future QB's franchise LT instead in Silverback.
'11-Liked Locker before the season, but not after his accuracy issues at U-Dub as a senior, liked Newton but felt moving up was too expensive. Did not like Lame Gabbert, or the fraud that was Ponder, but did really like the prospects for the '12 QB class (at that time, Luck, Jones, Barkley, Weeden, RG3 etc). After the team foolishly won some pointless grades and screwed up its draft slotting, Shanny still felt getting the QB in '12 was smarter than '13, because the '13 class had worrisome issues (Landry Jones back to back subpar years, Barkley was inconsistent, Tyler Bray and Wilson were entering make or break years etc) with all of the class in make or break years and with the redskins likely to be a 6-8 win team, a blue chip QB would be out of reach.
So they dealt the extra pair of #1's to insure that they got "their guy", rather than risk not getting remotely what was needed in the '13 class and delaying the development curve of the team that much more.
I thought the cost was insane, but necessary as Tannehill was a converted WR with an iffy track record, Weeden was way too old, Osweiller and Foles were far less talented, and the Wilson was too short.
A year later and RG3 had one of the best rookie years ever, the QB class in '13 is the worst QB class since 2000, and the '13 draft is considered perhaps the worst draft in nearly a decade.
Everything was very well thought out, hell, it was even so well thought out, that if RG3 had been a bust, the team would be in position to draft and develop another franchise option by the '15 draft when we had our first rounder again after losing the previous two. This trade? Nothing remotely like it, whether in terms of quality of prospects, planning, resourcefulness, or maximizing assets. It was just a panic move of epic stupidity, and even if it pays off, that won't validate the move, moves need to be made with forethought, planning, and insight, not out of impulse or panic. Save the latter kind of moves for ------ franchises like the Boulez, and the snyderatto redskins. I've liked a great deal of what GMGM has done over the years w/the draft and team building, but I loathed this.
So smart I don't even know it.
