Joined: Jul. 2021
Posts: 1,054
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It’s entertaining reading the comments after all these years. My opinion of the trade has not changed. I thought it was stupid that a team whose biggest problem was scoring goals would trade their best goal scorer for what some people called magic beans (a good way to describe futures that may or may not amount to anything). I get that they were probably not going to re-sign Skinner, but for what they got for him, I thought they would have been better off keeping him as a 1-year rental, and trading him at the deadline if it looked like they were going to fall short of the playoffs again. They were making good progress on their rebuild and they had just drafted Svechnikov, so there was a lot of optimism around the team, but this trade killed it. It looked like they were giving up on trying to make the playoffs that season and taking a step back in the rebuild. (I might have felt differently if I had seen the comments from people who thought Pu was NHL-ready – I wasn’t on CapFriendly at the time – but it turned out that I was right to think that the value was in the draft picks.) They made the playoffs anyway, and went all the way to the conference final, but maybe they could have done even better with Skinner still in the lineup, or some other roster player they could have traded him for instead of the magic beans.
From Buffalo’s perspective, I thought it was strange that the worst team in the league would trade for a 1-year rental, but I think they were looking for a quick fix, and they could have flipped him at the deadline and probably got back at least as much as they paid for him. Instead, they signed him to a contract they’d quickly regret, but they didn’t have to do that, so that doesn’t make it a bad trade.