Modifié 20 juill. 2022 à 0 h 15
Quoting: Hurricanes73
Exactly, this guy gets it
Quoting: noted
Tkachuk is going to return a hell of a lot more than Eichel did. He's 24, not coming off major neck surgery, and is going to be moved in the off-season when other teams can create space still. Oh and he's better....
I'm not really trying to split hairs on whether Tkachuk is better than Eichel but like if you think there's a definitive answer to that question you're being heavily heavily swayed by recency bias. Tkachuk had an unreal last season and everyone is over the moon but people forget how good Eichel was with like the most help he ever had being Jeff freaking Skinner. He was a point per game player in two seasons, 0.9ppg player in two other seasons before his injury. On Buffalo, playing center. Feels like an understatement to say that that's really really good. Tkachuk eclipsed (to put it lightly) the ppg barrier for the first time *this year* (although he was pretty close in 18-19). Eichel had a significant history of producing at an elite level before his injury that Tkachuk simply does not have. Like "Tkachuk is better than Eichel" is only a slam dunk take if we're talking about last season. Eichel was clearly the better player before that, and played the more premium position. Thus he returned a lot.
Is Tkachuk better than Eichel now? Maybe. I think it's way too early to say. Is Eichel recovered from injury, on a good team (relative to Buffalo) for the first time in his career going to allow him to return to form? Is Tkachuk away from Gaudreau still going to keep up elite production, or will he struggle without him as he did the previous two seasons, only scoring 23 and 16 goals with pedestrian defensive metrics?
We're all making assumptions on things we don't know with this. I'm assuming that STL is probably on a shortlist that Tkachuk has that he would sign an extension with and thus those teams have an edge in trade negotiations. That might not be true. It also might not be true that he'll net a huge return, because we've seen that when teams DO have that edge in negotiations, usually the return is smaller. (see Stone, but also see guys like Giroux to Florida and Fleury to Chicago) This is where Eichel having a contract is a double edged sword- teams had to accommodate the contract, but Eichel couldn't say "no" to any team, unless he wanted to sit out. Tkachuk- more or less -can, because he doesn't have a contract and if he does literally nothing will be given a contract that's 1 year long by an arbitor. It also might not be true that he'll be traded and extended, because we've seen guys that really want to go to free agency and won't extend their team controlled time longer than they have to (Copp, Panarin). Basically my point is that the variables are numerous and thus any number of outcomes are possible, including the ones that are being dismissed outright here.