Craig Laughlin Fan
Rejoint: nov. 2019
Messages: 5,296
Mentions "j'aime": 5,742
This trade, much like the Siegenthaler one, hurts now but had to be done from the Caps perspective. Stephenson was struggling to get ice time in DC behind Backstrom, Kuznetsov, and Eller which led to him struggling and getting buried on the 4th line, and to add insult to injury he failed to mesh with Reirden's "scheme"... if you can call it that. I was quite certain the Capitals would get nothing out of any Stephenson trade, so getting even a 5th was a decent trade at the time. Ended up working pretty well for Stephenson, and while the Caps would probably want to take the trade back on paper now, Stephenson was never going to develop where he was in DC and needed a change of scenery to help his development along.