RAIF, we might need your services...

What do you mean?

Want to take over MIN in the GM Game? I had to scale back my activity and thus retired.

The Senators were bridging all their players at this time. I suspect they were trying to win before 2018-19 when many of their key RFA deals would expire. If they did not make this trade, Zibanejad leaves as a UFA. He didn't breakout as a superstar until what would have been his final season under contract with the Senators. That same season, the Senators received a 1st round pick and two B/C type prospects for Matt Duchene. Matt Duchene was on pace for nearly 100 points. It is unlikely that Zibanejad would have returned much more than that.

Ultimately, it is astounding that the Senators were in such a bad spot due to Melnyk's budget that trading away Zibanejad before he broke out wouldn't have changed things one bit. The odds of the Senators signing him to the same mid-term extension the Rangers did was pretty low. He would have been gone as a UFA anyways. The same as Stone, Karlsson, Hoffman, Duchene, etc.

No thanks, sorry. There are quite a few other things I'm prioritizing right now. Thanks for the offer, though.

Once

Lindros to Philadelphia? That trade was bound to end up heavily in favor of one team just because of the sheer size of it, and clearly that team was Quebec. However, before the salary cap, there was an old adage that whoever gets the best player wins the trade, and Lindros was the best player. Forsberg eventually surpassed him, but not until concussions and other injuries ruined Lindros’s career. For 6 or 7 years, he was the dominant player they thought he would be, winning a Hart trophy and taking them to the Stanley Cup final. It took several years before that trade turned in favor of Quebec, which by that time had moved to Colorado.

Quebec/Colorado used this trade to build their first two cup winning teams, but other than Forsberg, most of it wasn’t directly from this trade. It was from subsequent trades that they used to parlay those players and picks into even better players and picks. Some of those trades, which also included other pieces from Colorado, turned out heavily in Colorado’s favor, but I don’t think you can judge this trade by independent trades they made later. For example, one of the draft picks turned out to be Jocelyn Thibault who, 3 ½ years after the Lindros trade, was traded to Montreal with two other players that weren’t part of the Lindros trade for Patrick Roy. It would be a big stretch to say they got Roy for Lindros, and an even bigger stretch to say that Philadelphia could have had Roy if they hadn’t traded for Lindros.

One interesting thing about that trade is that it wasn’t the deal Quebec wanted. They accepted what they thought was a better offer from the New York Rangers, but an arbitrator ruled that the Philadelphia offer had been accepted first. The New York offer doesn’t look as good on paper now, but at that time it may have looked better because the roster players they were offering were better than Philadelphia’s. (Forsberg was still just a prospect playing in Sweden.) The Rangers won the cup not long after that. I wonder if that would have happened if their offer had been accepted. It’s hard to say because I don’t think we know exactly what the package was. Some reports say it included Mike Richter, whom they wouldn’t have won the cup without, but other reports say that the goalie they offered was John Van Biesbrouck. If Richter wasn’t part of it, I think the Rangers would have been even better with Lindros.