Good Opinion Haver
Rejoint: juin 2018
Messages: 1,831
Mentions "j'aime": 934
Obviously losing the pick to the Rangers sucks considering your trade history, but most of the other things you mention, while leading to a very painful season, I think were actually pretty good for the Jets long-term.
You lost Trouba, who is overrated, and for who the Rangers are going to likely have hemorrage a better RHD (Fox or, more likely, DeAngelo) because of his expensive contract. I think the Jets should be very happy that he forced his way out and that they got something for him despite him only wanting to go to one destination, and that they avoided signing that contract. In exchange you got Pionk who, while he shouldn't be playing on your first pairing, is a perfectly fine RHD and those are tough to find.
Little and Byfuglien, yeah it sucks to lose them too but Byfuglien only had a year left after this one anyway, and was 35 years old, so this was a problem that was going to need to be solved sooner rather than later, while Little was incapable of adequately holding down the 2C spot (to the point that the Jets traded for another center twice!), so he was going to be relegated to the third line for the rest of his career (at best) and that's not ideal for a guy 30+ making over five million a year. Even though it was in circumstances that were extremely unfortunate, especially in the case of Little where it wasn't his fault, that's over 12+ million in salary cap space no longer committed to older guys that aren't part of the core.
Meanwhile, all those other guys you mentioned (Myers, Tanev, Chiarot)- I think they are only a great loss because there was no one ready to step up and really take their spot. However, I'm not sure I'd be any happier if I was a Jets fan carrying the Myers and Tanev contracts around right now.
Winnipeg now has a ton of flexibility that they previously did not have and that was going to really handcuff them as all of this young talent came up to be re-signed. In exchange, they missed the playoffs- oh well, pandemic- which should be fine because they were not going anywhere in them anyway (no offense). They now just need to use this flexibility correctly to patch the holes in the roster and they'll be fine. The core of this team hasn't changed and is still really freaking good. The supporting cast just ended up needing to be changed out a little sooner than anticipated, but you now have a lot more cap space to do it than you would have and that's important in a flat cap world.