Quoting: palhal
Sens won the EK situation when EK apparently turned down 10m from the Sens. That 10m should could spend better than the current edition of EK...which the Sharks are find out.
Yea, and what a bonus that trade was to the Sens getting Norris and other assets.
Sens offer to EK was for show to appease the public.
EK wasn't re-signing with a Melnyk owned team, and they knew that at the time.
There was some weird stuff going on in the lead up to the EK trade that made it seem like Dorion was sabotaging the deal. Teams reportedly felt like they'd ask Dorion what he wanted for EK, Dorion would give them a price, they would meet the price, then Dorion would change it up on them. There was the thing at the trade deadline with Ryan being attached to EK, which made him impossible to trade. Then Dorion sent Mike Hoffman to San Jose, who were at various points a front runner for EK, and eventually landed him. Had Doug Wilson not pulled a fast one and flipped Hoffman to Florida, without Dorion's knowledge or consent, sending Hoffman to San Jose would not only eliminate the destination that EK eventually ended up at, but also lose the Senators a tremendous amount of leverage by eliminating a suitor.
https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/23935807/nhl-denies-eugene-melnyk-negotiating-sell-ottawa-senators
There was a bit of smoke that summer about a potential sale. Because Melnyk was the sticking point with Karlsson re-signing, it makes me wonder if Dorion had any inside knowledge about the possibility of a sale and wanted to try to sabotage a Karlsson trade long enough for a sale to materialize. It's also entirely possible that Dorion, an inexperienced GM, was way in over his head and stalling to try and find a way to gain enough leverage for a satisfactory return. Which is the same thing Sakic did with Duchene, when he eventually lucked out and found his mark in Dorion. (Although this wasn't the first time Dorion was someone's mark for Duchene. Years earlier, Dorion offered Patrick Roy a better package than the one he eventually gave to Sakic for Duchene. He offered Zibanejad and Chabot for Duchene, which Sakic likely regretted turning down.)
To tie all this back to Josh Norris, the Senators got extremely luck with how the Karlsson trade turned out, and Norris is a big part of that. If you go back and read the Karlsson trade thread, the return was unanimously panned. Without the immense luck of the Senators getting their 1C/2Cs in Norris and Stutzle out of that trade, the rebuild would be nowhere right now. Norris was expected to be a 3C, and the 1st was expected to be in the middle or end of the round, which would have gotten the Senators another good but not great prospect like a Lassi Thomson.