Hockey Trade Rumors

Well for Philadelphia this was an awesome trade. Forsberg wasn’t going to help the team at all for the remainder of the season so why not acquire a top pairing defenseman prospect in Ryan Parent, a top six winger in Scottie Upshall, and a 1st and 3rd rdp in a deep draft. This was a great job done by the Flyers for pulling this off. It’s doubtful that they could have acquired more.
 

For Nashville this trade is great if they win the cup this year and that’s about it. If you look into the not so near future, as in next year, this trade becomes glaringly bad for Nashville. Forsberg will not resign with Nashville. That means they lose Ryan Parent, Scottie Upshall, a 1st rdp, and a 3rd rdp for one cup run! Those players could have helped Nashville win multiple cups or could have been traded for multiple players that could help the team for multiple years.

Why can I guarantee that Forsberg won’t resign with the Predators? Because they don’t have the cap room! Let’s assume the cap goes up to 47 M, like it’s expected to. Nashville’s current salary, excluding Forsberg, is 38 M. That leaves 9 M free. But wait, Vokoun gets a 3 M raise next year (already established), we can assume Kariya will get an additional 1 M, Timonen will get at least 3 M more, and it will cost approximately 3 M to resign their RFA’s and UFA’s. That adds up to 10 M, 1 M more than the room available EXCLUDING FORSBERG’S SALARY (which will be around 5 M).

Now let’s consider some situations:

Forsberg gets injured before or during the early stage of the playoffs resulting in this deal becoming a complete failure.

Vokoun gets injured. Mason won’t carry the team, I guarantee it. The team will plummet. The deal becomes a complete failure.

Forsberg’s presence disturbs the team’s chemistry and they go out early in the playoffs. The deal becomes a complete failure.

Forsberg is great but they still lose in the playoffs. The deal becomes a complete failure.

Forsberg gels with everyone and they win the cup. The deal is a success if the teams intent was to win one cup and worry about the future when they’re faced with it.

So if you calculate the odds of this working out for this season/playoffs vs the odds of it not working out, I’d say it’s 50/50. Injuries happen, sometimes teams don’t gel. But it is definite, 100%, that this deal was bad for Nashville if you’re looking ahead, even one season ahead.

I’d go as far as to say this trade was worse than the Joe Thornton trade. Nashville gets a superstar for 4 months. Boston at least got Kobasew, Ference and whatever they’ll get for Sturm (who is by the way severely underrated just because he has had one bad season, last year he was great).