While i agree, as a Leafs fan, this statement kind of bothers me. When we Leafs fans are on this site proposing for defense, the asking price is always astronomical....and backed up by the old Larsson/Hall standard. Now here we are talking about a 27 year old 40-50 point Dman for a 25 year old 45-55 point center and we are being told the value leans heavily towards the forward?
Yes.
Edmonton would be looking at Gardiner purely as a rental and one that doesn’t fill a positional need for us. We need RHD.
On top of that, OP is asking for a player that we have absolutely no desire to move. None.
Effectively by asking for RNH youre asking Edmonton to remove one of only three forwards we have that we can count on to produce and be responsible defensively, and you’re asking us to move this player for one year of Jake Gardiner, who would do nothing but add to our glut of LHD.
Some might say he can play the right side. Wonderful. We already have Russell playing the right side.
Some might say once we have Gardiner we can re-sign him and trade one of our other D for forward help. That seems like a lot of gambles and maybes to shoehorn in a guy we don’t overly want in the first place.
In summary.
You’re trying to trade an ~80 point team a rental.
Said rental is not the handedness we want.
Said rental has some fairly major defensive issues.
You’re asking for a piece we cannot afford to lose in return.
Rental offensive defencemen do not return core pieces. Look no further than Kevin Shattenkirk last year to see how most of the league would value Gardiner.
300+ games of RNH >>>> 82 games of Gardiner. Whatever other mental gymnastics you need to do to convince yourself that this is somehow bad for Toronto be my guest, but trust me when I tell you that no Oiler fan anywhere wants any part of shipping RNH out for what would amount to Gardiner’s 2018 trade deadline return of a low first and some spare parts.
