Sens trade Zibanejad for Brassard

[matchesmalone]

I've pretty much talked myself off the ledge on this one. Mika was a fan favourite and you can't deny that he had huge offensive upside. But I do like that:

-Ottawa could have more Hoffman money set aside now
-Ottawa has a left handed centre to play with Ryan or Stone
-Ottawa has a centre who can rock the man advantage
-Brassard is a player in his prime with a manageable contract
-Brassard can play effectively in all phases and is much more complete that Mika

All i'm hearing from the Senators fanbase is "This team is wasting the prime years of its core! When is management gonna DOOOOO something?!"
So management goes out and gets Ryan and Phaneuf and Brassard.
And the fanbase says "This team is mortgaging the future! What were they thiiinkiiing?"

A) This team cannot bring in free agents without overpaying. No one wants to play in Canada. Period. Name one UFA who took a team-friendly deal to play in Canada this year. No one.
B) This team has to give up picks and prospects. This team can't eat salary so it has no other leverage. They parted with the guy who was a contract nightmare waiting to happen.*
C) This team has enough firepower and it needs more two-way players. Bona fide NHL players aren't cheap and I'd like to know what other assets the team had that other GMs actually want.

*again, I liked Mika and I know a lot of fans felt the same way but his play wasn't in line with the expectations of the organization and that always leads to negotiation problems (especially in Ottawa).

There were so many times while I was reading this that I had to stop and re-read bits with my jaw slightly lowered and eyebrow raised. A couple of times I literally said out loud, "uhhhhhhh, what?"

I don't even know where to begin...

Let me start with the places I agree: yes, a left shot center to play with Stone and Ryan is a good thing. Yes, Brassard is very good on the powerplay - that is basically the only difference to their offensive numbers - although I think Zibanejad had the potential to be as well, if he was used more often on the left point beside Karlsson on the top unit. And one thing you didn't pointed out, which is really the best possible explanation I've been able to come up with for this trade, is that Zibanejad seemed to have serious issues with consistency, but he is still fairly young, so there is still room for that to improve. Perhaps conditioning, but that's something I know nothing about.

Now, I guess I start with the first point, Hoffman's contract. I went through and did these calculations a couple of weeks ago because I was worried about a possible Hoffman offer sheet. Even if someone were to give him the maximum second-level offer sheet - around 7.5 million - and Zibanejad were to re-sign next year at 5.25 million (this was the number I predicted two weeks ago, before this trade), we'd still come in between 5 and 10 million under the cap (depending on the structure of Ceci's contract and how Pageua and Lazar do this season and what kind of contracts they earn).

True, maybe it's not just the cap we have to worry about, but an internal budget. Still, lets think about this rationally for a moment. There would have been essentially two possible scenarios: either Zibanejad doesn't improve much over last season, in which case, some of his recent comparables for contract negotiations would be Nick Foligno, Frans Nielsen, Clark MacArthur, Vince Trocheck, and Derick Brassard himself. Meaning he'd be getting somewhere between 4.75-5.5 million. The other, admittedly less likely, possible scenario would be that he has a breakout season and we'd have to pay up with a huge contract, but honestly, if we suddenly have a 65-70 point first line center, is anyone going to complain about having to give him a massive contract, especially when we have the cap space to pay him?

All i'm hearing from the Senators fanbase is "This team is wasting the prime years of its core! When is management gonna DOOOOO something?!"
So management goes out and gets Ryan and Phaneuf and Brassard.
And the fanbase says "This team is mortgaging the future! What were they thiiinkiiing?"

Ugh. These are some of the most irritating arguments I keep hearing from sports fans. Actually, not just sports fans, but people talking about politics or anything really. Logicians have a name for this fallacy, but I forget what it is. The simple formula for it is this: Step one: take different people from the same set of something - all republicans, or all minorities, or all Ottawa Senators fans. Step two: find a point on which they disagree amongst themselves. Step three: collapse these competing viewpoints into two viewpoints of the class in general, ignoring differences between members of said class, thus implying that they are all hypocrites.

Aside from the occasional morons, the Sens fans who were saying we are wasting the prime years of the core were not the same people who were upset about mortgaging the future. And for those that were saying both, you also have to take timing into consideration: about two years ago it was looking like this was a young team on the brink of becoming a contender, so it made sense to think it was time to make a move, but now we've taken a step back over the past couple years, so it makes sense to be hesitant about trying to suddenly make a contender out of a team that missed the playoffs last year.

The Phaneuf trade made sense, we barely gave up any futures, pretty much just Lindberg. Even the Ryan trade was pretty decent. But this isn't just picks and prospects here. This is player who just turned 23 and is entering his 5th (or 4th full) season. Just hitting his prime.

A) This team cannot bring in free agents without overpaying. No one wants to play in Canada. Period. Name one UFA who took a team-friendly deal to play in Canada this year. No one.

Zibanejad was going to become RFA. I get your point, but why would we need to sign a UFA or trade anyone to fill this role when we had a perfectly good young player for it already.

B) This team has to give up picks and prospects. This team can't eat salary so it has no other leverage. They parted with the guy who was a contract nightmare waiting to happen.

If you say so.

C) This team has enough firepower and it needs more two-way players. Bona fide NHL players aren't cheap and I'd like to know what other assets the team had that other GMs actually want.

Now, this leads me to the most baffling thing about your whole argument. Brassard is a more complete player than Zibanejad? Team has enough firepower and needs more two way players? What in God's name are you talking about? Brassard has been in the league for close to a decade, and has spent significant time under four different coaches, and none of them have trusted him enough defensively to a. play him regularly on the penalty kill - his most ever was 15 seconds per game in 2015 - or b. play him consistently in difficult situations - every year of his career he has always started a significant majority of shifts in the offensive, and while there were a couple of years where his qualcomp was fairly high, for an offensive player starting mostly in the offensive zone, that generally means more that they are playing against the other teams' good shutdown players, than that they are shutting down the other team's good offensive players. This season Zibanejad's and Brassard's deployment and corsi numbers were practically identical, but Zibanejad's two-way game is still evolving, as he was given the opportunity to play regular PK minutes for the first time in his career - just 1:25 per game, which still works out to 119 total minutes on the season, more than Brassard has played in his entire career. Also, Zibanejad broke 50% in the faceoff circle for the first time in his career this year... oh, and so did Brassard.


So yeah, I'm emotional about the trade, I was and still am a huge Zibanejad fan. But the beauty of the human being is, as Nietzsche said, "human is a bridge between ape and posthuman (overhuman, superhuman, or however you want to translate it)." Now this can be interpreted a lot of different ways, but if we take it that the ape represents pure emotion or instinct, and the superhuman represents pure rationality, then this highlights perfectly the point I want to make: it doesn't have to be a choice for humans; our emotions can be backed up by rational argument, and our rational arguments can lead us to feel certain emotions, and both of those statements are perfectly exemplified in this case. You said you talked yourself off the ledge, for me, I started out with a pure emotional reaction, then I stepped back, calmed down, took some time to think about and research the situation, and now not only has my rationalizing justified my emotional response, it has in fact intensified it.