ozzzie19
Registered User
- May 13, 2015
- 530
- 260
There really isn't precedent for that type of package if one of the firsts is in the top 10 (admittedly an arbitrary cutoff point).You needed 2 firsts and if there’s protections on the first, a highly rated prospect
I went back to 2015 (another arbitrary cutoff point) and looked at all the trades where a team knew they were trading away a top 10 pick. Here they are:
2021: The somewhat convoluted OEL/Garland's rights for a bunch of short term salary, the 9OA and a 2nd. Hard to really compare this given all the salary considerations and the wide variance in valuations on OEL.
2017: Stepan and Raanta for the 7OA and Deangelo. This was a great move by Gorton, despite the fact that his pick tanked and Deangelo was a cancer (which he was prior to the trade as well). Deangelo was a former first rounder, but he had been traded the year prior for a 2nd rounder and had red flags aplenty. Certainly Cat is much better than Stepan/Raanta but Stepan had cost certainty whereas Cat very much does not.
And thats it! Teams very very rarely trade away their picks that they know are going to be at the top of the draft.
The Seth Jones trade was 2 firsts but it was a known 12OA and the Hawks likely expected the 2022 pick to be in the middle of the 1st round (not 6OA).
The Duchene trade has to be one of the most convoluted and horrible trades and again, it wasn't known what pick OTT would be giving up.
The Karlsson trade that ended up with a 3OA had conditions that made it unlikely to be a high first (which was 2 years later) and included two seconds. This is probably the closest comparison (and its not all that close) to the Cat trade when you consider talent and contract (and even then TDL deals are different than draft day deals). As much as I love Cat and think hes a top 25 player, at the time, Karlsson was probably a top 10 or so player. And Cat's contract situation is more or less about one year behind where Karlsson's was at the time (given Cat's high QO). Maybe those two differences even each other out. And again, Karlsson netted only one first which was not expected to be a high pick.
So all in all, there really is very little precedent for teams trading away a known high first round pick, and no precedent for trading a known high first round pick and another first rounder.
I think we all just had unrealistic expectations.