Pominville going back to Buffalo

[Jasmine]

To #Sabres:
Marco Scandella
Jason Pominville
4th RD pick

To #Wild:
Tyler Ennis
Marcus Foligno
3rd RD pick

* No salary retained

[Josh]

I think this deal makes sense for both teams but maybe favours Buffalo for the next year or two and then favours Minnesota afterwards.

[matchesmalone]

All I can say is this trade, or one like it, was absolutely necessary for Buffalo. Their franchise players, Eichel and Ristolainen, are entering their primes, and don't seem to have a lot of help at the moment, particularly on defense. You can't let those guys continue to play some of their best years on a losing team and develop a loser mentality. This is in part why Edmonton lost so much value on Hall and Eberle. They have a bright future with the likes of Nic Baptiste, Justin Bailey, Cliff Pu, Alex Nylander an Casey Mittelstadt, but all of those guys are at least a couple years away from being impact players. They have a decent core with Ristolainen, McCabe and Bogosian on defense, Lehner, Nilsson, Ulmark in net, and Eichel, Reinhart, O'Reilly, Okposo and Kane at forward, but after that, there is a steep dropoff. Getting a reliable veteran forward like Pominville to round out their top six and a rock-solid defenseman like Scandella to round out their top four, whether it was a good trade or not, again, was absolutely necessary. This will allow them to at least compete for a playoff spot over the next couple years while the top prospects develop.

[Josh]

All I can say is this trade, or one like it, was absolutely necessary for Buffalo. Their franchise players, Eichel and Ristolainen, are entering their primes, and don't seem to have a lot of help at the moment, particularly on defense. You can't let those guys continue to play some of their best years on a losing team and develop a loser mentality. This is in part why Edmonton lost so much value on Hall and Eberle. They have a bright future with the likes of Nic Baptiste, Justin Bailey, Cliff Pu, Alex Nylander an Casey Mittelstadt, but all of those guys are at least a couple years away from being impact players. They have a decent core with Ristolainen, McCabe and Bogosian on defense, Lehner, Nilsson, Ulmark in net, and Eichel, Reinhart, O'Reilly, Okposo and Kane at forward, but after that, there is a steep dropoff. Getting a reliable veteran forward like Pominville to round out their top six and a rock-solid defenseman like Scandella to round out their top four, whether it was a good trade or not, again, was absolutely necessary. This will allow them to at least compete for a playoff spot over the next couple years while the top prospects develop.

Spot on as usual.

This post made me wonder something. You seem to laud so many teams' prospect depth, and I know it's kind of your thing so.. are there any teams that you would say have a pretty bare cupboard?

[matchesmalone]

Haha fair point. A few things. Non-hockey-related, I'm usually just super positive about everything now days. I try to compliment wherever possible and avoid complaint where possible. I was going to say avoid criticism, but constructive criticism is fine.

On that note, you will notice that the Sabres prospects I listed are all forwards. You may also notice that I said a "bright future". When making a conscious effort to be positive, one tends to make everything sound good, and so needs to use a lot of modifiers like "absolutely", "very", "extremely" to distinguish particularly good things. No such adjectives here. On top of their excellent group of forward prospects, Buffalo also has some very goalie prospects, but their depth of defense prospects is really quite abysmal. So overall I'd say their prospect pool is above average, but not by a lot. Maybe just inside the top 10. So yeah, above average means bright future, which would mean at any given time there would be roughly 14 teams with bright futures.

And over the years, I have lauded a lot of teams prospect depths, but different teams at different times. Hell, in the ten years since I've known you guys, probably just about every team in the league has had an impressive prospect pool at some point or another.

Buuuut, to answer your question, while I haven't spent enough time analyzing this year's draft yet, and so can't take that too much into account, I would say Dallas, New Jersey, Carolina, Calgary, L.A., Anaheim and Philadelphia are some of the definitely below average prospect pools in the league right now.