Given the noises out of Ottawa, it seems increasingly likely that Erik Karlsson isn’t going to be an Ottawa Senator for very much longer. It might be at this year’s trade deadline, it might be in the summer, it might be at next year’s trade deadline but it sure seems like it’s coming. With Karlsson wanting to be paid whatever his market value might be and Ottawa having an internal cap along with some expensive contractual flotsam, it just doesn’t seem like there’s a sensible deal to be made between the parties.
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Meanwhile, the Vancouver Canucks have problems of their own. While they’ve been hesitant to call it a rebuild, the Canucks have been rebuilding for three years now. They’ve actually done pretty well, all things considered. They came into the rebuild with Bo Horvat, who’s panned out. Brock Boeser is a hit. Elias Pettersson is doing extremely well in Sweden. The problem Vancouver has is that the pipeline on defence is dry, outside of Olli Juolevi, about whom there are some question marks. As a result, Vancouver’s rebuild seems like it’s at least a few years away from bearing fruit.
This is kind of a meeting of two questions. How do you get a return for a player of Karlsson’s stature that has some reasonable likelihood of producing a player you build a franchise around? How do you deal with a rebuild that hasn’t produced much in the way of defencemen but looks to be producing some good forwards?
The returns on superstar players in their prime in the post-2005 NHL have been dismal. There’s a pattern that repeats over and over: team trades player for a package including prospects with much lower ceilings than the player they’re giving up and some draft picks. Generally, it’s a good team acquiring the player, which means that the picks are later in the first round. And those are the good trades. The bad ones send a guy in the midst of a Hart Trophy and Art Ross Trophy-winning season away for Marco Sturm, Wayne Primeau and Brad Stuart.
There are a couple of reasons for this. A salary capped league limits the market for superstar players. Teams only have so much salary cap room. A lot of teams are hesitant to go out and get a superstar when they don’t think they’ve got a shot at winning. Teams that think they’ve got a shot at winning right away tend to already have their own players to whom they’re paying significant dollars. This limits the futures available to teams trading a superstar because you’re likely going to be looking at later first round draft picks. Good teams don’t want to trade the players who drive their success.
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The issue here isn’t that Karlsson isn’t great, a Hall of Fame class player — we can debate how great he is, but he’s a fantastic player. The issue is that the league’s structure acts to depress the market available to the Senators for him. An expiring contract doesn’t help either, as it injects Karlsson into the process — he’s got a de facto veto, as teams will presumably be willing to give up more for a longer commitment from him.
While kicking this around on Twitter, I was surprised to learn there’s a school of thought that Colorado got a lot for Matt Duchene. At the time that trade was made, I thought the Avalanche got a lot of things; I didn’t think it was that likely that they got a franchise cornerstone.
Last summer, when we launched The Athletic Rebuilding, Editor Custance had me take a look at the likelihood of finding franchise cornerstones at a given slot in the draft. After looking over history and working furiously on the back of an envelope, the odds that I came up with were as follows:
- First pick: 90 per cent,
- Second pick: 60 per cent
- Third/fourth pick: 15 per cent
- Picks 5-20: 5 per cent
- Picks 21-30: 2 per cent
- Picks 31-60: 1 per cent
- Picks 61+: .07 per cent
Here’s what Colorado got in the Duchene deal:
- Protected 2018 first round pick from Ottawa that the Senators can push to 2019 if the pick is in the top ten in 2018, which it likely will be.
- 2018 second round pick from Nashville.
- 2019 third round pick from Ottawa.
- Shane Bowers, who went 28th overall in 2017.
- Samuel Girard, who went 47th overall in 2016.
- Vladislav Kamenev, who went 42nd overall in 2014.
What are the odds that Colorado gets a franchise cornerstone out of all that? Pretty low, I’d say. You can reasonably call the Ottawa pick a five per cent shot at the moment. Ottawa protected themselves against a year in which everything went wrong. Even if the pick slides, the smart money is on the Senators picking at five or later next year. Second round-picks are historically 1/100 shots. Third round picks are less than that. Bowers, Girard and Kamenev might be good players but I don’t perceive them as likely to be the kind of players around whom you build a team.
In short, Avalanche GM Joe Sakic got a lot of things in that trade but none of it is likely to produce a franchise-altering player.
Karlsson’s in a different class than Duchene but that’s kind of the fundamental problem with making a trade like this: if anyone has a player or pick that might reasonably produce a player of the same class, it won’t be on the table. Why get the more expensive version with more miles on the odometer in exchange for a version that’s got a good shot of being the same thing but is cheaper and with fewer miles?
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The trap the Senators need to avoid when trading Karlsson is accepting a bunch of things that look shiny — first round picks and prospects — but have an exceedingly low likelihood of producing franchise cornerstones. In other words, don’t make what’s been the good trade for a superstar since Lockout II. Find a way to make a better one. Ottawa’s going to need one of those cornerstone players once Karlsson is gone. This makes it difficult to trade Karlsson to a team that’s contending right now and get a return that’s got any sort of a realistic shot at giving them a player you can build a team around.
Karlsson’s salary request further complicates things. Not unreasonably, Karlsson is looking for market value. Let’s assume that’s $13-million per season. This is going to dramatically shrink the number of teams that can afford him while icing a competitive team at the same time. Basically, Karlsson needs to find a team that has a lot of cost controlled talent in the medium term, could use a game-altering defenceman and could put together a package for Ottawa without destroying that mix.
It’s harder to find this team than you might think. Ottawa’s not going to get a No. 1 pick and the right to draft Rasmus Dahlin from anyone in exchange for Karlsson. If they were looking for a pick at the top of this year’s draft other than number one, well, run down the list. Arizona has no money. Buffalo would be a fantastic match, although I’m skeptical that Karlsson wants to play out his career there. It’s also in Ottawa’s division, which would be a tough pill for Senators’ fans to swallow. Montreal would be an interesting opportunity for Karlsson but it has the difficulties that would come with trading him to Buffalo turned up to eleven.
Incidentally, NHL teams get how valuable those top couple picks are. They move very infrequently. One of the rare occasions on which they’ve moved in the past twenty years was Ottawa trading Alexei Yashin for the No. 2 overall pick that became Jason Spezza in 2001. Another of those rare instances involved Vancouver in 1999. Brian Burke made a series of trades that altered the history of the Canucks and, with a favourable wink from the hockey gods, could easily have brought the Stanley Cup to Vancouver for the first time since 1915.
Which brings me to Vancouver, which seems like a perfect solution to Ottawa’s problem in a lot of different ways.
To start with, Vancouver might as well be on the moon. Karlsson wouldn’t be playing the Senators once a month — if he ever played the Senators more than twice in a month, nobody would be complaining about the deal.
More importantly, it’s entirely possible the Canucks will have a very high draft pick that isn’t the Dahlin pick to use as the heart of a package for Karlsson. If you buy the argument that Stanley Cups disproportionately go to teams with those cornerstone type players, well, I’m not sure where Ottawa will get a better chance at such a player than with a deal built around, say, pick 2-to-4 if that’s what Vancouver ends up with.
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So why should the Canucks be interested in a trade like this now? Why should they diverge from the path on which they’ve found themselves if they don’t win the Dahlin lottery? Unfortunately for Vancouver, TSN’s Bob McKenzie has a consensus top four based on a poll of scouts that features three forwards after Dahlin. As is mentioned above, their top three young players or prospects are also forwards.
In fact, when Colleague Wheeler did his ranking of Vancouver’s prospects in November, he had only two defencemen in the top twelve. One of them, Jordan Subban, has since been traded. So unless Juolevi turns into a high high-end player or the Canucks win the draft lottery this year and pick Dahlin, Vancouver’s rebuild has a massive problem: it’s not turning out quality top four defencemen who turn into good NHLers when the forwards are ready. Edmonton and Buffalo are recent examples of how well that goes. If the Canucks draft one this year, he’s probably at least 2.5 years away. Do the Canucks want to commit to burning at least three more seasons while doing a traditional rebuild?
Now, it might seem sort of absurd to suggest adding Erik Karlsson to the Canucks would make a huge difference. He’s one player, right? How much of a difference can he make? Well…the Canucks have a massive hole in their lineup when Chris Tanev isn’t on the ice and when the third pair isn’t on the ice. The Canucks have been pretty average when the third pair is on the ice this year — their 50.2 per cent Corsi% ranks 15th in the NHL, despite the Canucks having lost Bo Horvat for a big chunk of the season. That’s not a terrible starting point.
If you look at the top four minutes, the Canucks send Chris Tanev into brutal zone starts against tough competition and he does relatively well, putting up a 47.6 per cent Corsi% on a 42.2 per cent zone start. When Tanev isn’t on the ice, the top four is putting up a 46.3 per cent Corsi% on 52.0 per cent zone start.
The idea’s pretty simple: Karlsson would goose that number enormously. If Tanev can stay healthy and anchor a tough minutes pair that does well in the circumstances, Karlsson’s free to run wild with the softer side of the top four minutes. He’s historically put up great possession numbers on teams that were pretty sketchy in his absence; it wouldn’t surprise me if he could move that 46.3 per cent to 52 per cent or 53 per cent, which is an incredible improvement.
I hasten to add that I’m sketching out an idea here, rather than presenting what I continue to be an irrefutable argument. If I was Vancouver, I’d want to dig further into Karlsson’s likely impact, health and how he can be expected to age. I’d want to be pretty comfortable that Pettersson is going to be a serious player by 2020-21. But if I was convinced of those things, I can see the argument for a move like this. Men plan, God laughs. You can’t draw up a diagram of a rebuild. You have to take those opportunities that arise along the way.
Karlsson’s view matters here as well. Vancouver would provide him with a team with two young forwards who look excellent along with a third excellent prospect. If he wants to be paid market value, I’m not sure he’ll find a better spot to do so in terms of having some pieces in place that might form the basis of a successful top six forward group who aren’t yet getting paid big dollars.
From Ottawa’s perspective, history tells us that they’ll certainly lose the Karlsson deal from a talent perspective. Again, it’s nothing to do with Karlsson or his ability as a player and everything to do with the structure of the league. The only question is whether they’re willing to take fewer assets in order to get ones that are more likely to be a cornerstone of a Stanley Cup contender. If winning a Stanley Cup is Ottawa’s ultimate goal, pursuing a deal like this rather than the typical package for a high-end player on an expiring contract seems like the right course of action.