Quoting: LIRIK
The way you said it, it's like EVERY top 6 center is worth more than ANY wingers in the league, which is very wrong.
I didn't compare Caufield to Kane or Panarin, but he's definitly in the same mould as Kane. Small goal scorer.
And by the way, they're all small unidimentionnal forwards. If you think Kane or Panarin are 2-way forwards, i don't think they ever played a single PK shift in their entire career.
PK doesn't necessarily mean you are good defensively, but still Caufield is nowhere close to the class of those two yet. He could get there, but isn't yet.
The center/wing thing is just a generality from everything you hear from NHL execs and reporters. As they say, the hardest position to fill in hockey is 1C, the easiest is wing. So, when you have two players of similar abilities and one is a center and the other a winger, the center almost always carries more value.
So, that's not saying Caufield is a bad player, it's just if the Jets move a center they don't want to replace him with a winger. They need a center to fill the spot, if they wanted a winger they would have kept Laine.