If you're COL what compels you to trade that first round pick? They can see what's happening around this team just like anyone else. If they're betting people, they're probably thinking it's going to be a top 5 pick. The onus is on Ottawa to somehow salvage things and perform significantly better than they did last year.
COL trades the pick for cost certainty, and because it's worth more to OTT than any other team including COL, so COL can extort something from OTT that otherwise would not have been available.
Mark Stone is a 60-80 point excellent two way forward who is perceived to be captain material in terms of leadership. We don't know that COL would want him or have any indication that OTT would trade him, but if both those aspects end up coming to fruition, COL could get Stone at a massive discount compared to what other teams might have to pay just based on being able to exploit having our 2019 pick.
Colorado knows we're a tire fire, but we've been a tire fire since the Duchene trade, and even with everything going wrong, we only ended up picking 4th overall. It's very unlikely to end up with a 1st overall pick in this league. In this proposed scenario, COL doesn't know we intend to do a full tear down. They probably know that Karl and Hoffman are gone, but they don't know if we're getting NHL players backs, prospects, etc. Right now, the plan at least publicly is to re-sign at least Stone+Duchene, and then acquire young players who can help us now in other deals. So if COL buys that, the pick is a lot more likely to be in the 4-8 type range than it is to be 1 or 2.
In the proposal in my post, Sakic ends up looking like a genius because all of a sudden he's turned 2 years of Duchene, 16th+50th OA, and a future third into an extended Stone who is AS GOOD as Duchene, and then Bowers, Girard, and Kamenov. THat's ridiculous value considering Stone and Duchene are pretty much a lateral move. Then, regardless of what happens after we get back the pick because if we tank our way to a top 3 pick, he can easily fall back on "They weren't doing a tear down without their pick, so we wouldn't have gotten that high of a pick had we kept it and they still had Stone, Duchene, etc". So it'll be hard for people to say he gave up Jack Hughes for Mark Stone in the incredibly unlikely chance we manage to win the lottery.