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Canes Trade de Haan, Saarela

It's the Saarela part that bothers me the most. DeHaan wasn't bad. Wasn't great. And might not be missed. But Saarela was a decent prospect. Forsberg isn't much more than an average backup. So, we save a little cap space?
 
Immediate reaction.......Yuck! Don't like.

I actually was thinking Waddell has been pretty decent in the last several months then boom, we see a dumb trade like this and remember the Atlanta Thrasher Don Waddell is alive and well.

de Haan was a big part of what made the Canes D better last year! So you gave away a top 4 D and a solid prospect ready to play NHL minutes for a scrub goalie that is a third stringer on most teams and a cheap affordable defenseman that saves some bucks on your D core overall.

Congratulations Don, Dundon must be proud.
 
I don’t usually join choruses pronouncing that a trade must be a prelude to something bigger but this one is so odd, unless there’s something else going on here that we haven’t heard about, that it certainly raising the anticipation level in advance of free agency.


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FWIW, Brind'Amour doesn't like Saarela. Didn't like his camp, and he got an attitude when he got sent down early. Yeah, he had a good season in Charlotte, but he was a guy we took in a trade, not somebody we invested in scouting-wise and I never got the sense he was really going to get a look in camp this year. So, yeah ... leverage his good AHL campaign and open up the way for kids you actually like. Fine. DeHaan ... love the compete level and he's all class, but I though he slipped a peg or two from his best days on the Island and he's not getting any younger. So, again ... fine.

The return straight up bugs me, though. I know we had to get some bloody goalie under contract to be able to get rid of Darling, but THIS one? Ugh. I only saw him play once in Chicago but he didn't strike me as an NHL keeper and he doesn't have anything in his resume that indicates to me that his career is likely to take an upswing. He's 26, and has a couple of decent AHL reasons on a fairly long resume. That's more than likely all the guy is ... a decent AHLer. I mean, fine ... but why not just freaking sign Ned to a 2-way and be done with it. Why get tricky at the expense of a veteran d-man if you don't have to? Because if you're looking for a silver lining in Forsling ... it ain't there. He's pedestrian at BEST ... and we already have at least 2 and maybe as many as 4 guys who are as good as him who already can't find a spot on the NHL roster.

This trade makes some sense in the accounting office, but none on the ice and I do NOT like that tend.

And as a PS ... trading for Anton freaking Forsberg is HARDLY the way to convince me that you know how to scout goalies ahead of needing to sign one in free agency. Suddenly I'm full off praying that Mrazek doesn't get an offer he can't refuse on July 1. Not that I like him all that much, but I don't hate the guy ... and that's suddenly not nothing.
 
de Haan was probably out until December. Replacing him with a 3rd pair dman isn’t the replacement. This does nothing except clear more cap space. Forsberg is a RFA, so he doesn’t allow us to buy out Darling. And his career numbers are...bad. 45 games played, 11-24-4, 3.21/.901. Forsling is Haydn Fleury with a few goals thrown in, 122 games played, 8g, 19a. He averaged 17:05 in 43 games.
 
Not sure what this move is all about, unless it's to shore up the AHL and allow Charlotte an option as Ned gets the promotion? And allows the team to bring up Bean and/or Fleury? It doesn't matter if deHaan will be out as the team has Faulk on the block. So yes, this one is a bit of a head scratcher for me...
 
This one is going to require an awful lot of thought, faith and waiting.

As already noted, Forsberg doesn't immediately fix our 'you must have 3 goalies under contract on July 1st' situation (has anyone figured out if that is BY THE END OF THE DAY ON JULY 1ST?) Oh, and as JB correctly noted, Forsberg sucks. He's no better than a dozen other RFA goalies kicking around the league. Gustav Forsling is a #7 Dman on his best day. He is not even close to a replacement for de Haan.

So what did we actually do here? We dumped Calvin de Haan's 4.5 million salary and cap hit, that is what we did. This is almost the opposite of the trades we are used to making with Chicago. De Haan was the dump, Saarela was the sweetener. Forsberg and Forsling are just noise. Kahuna is correct to speculate on whether we even qualify Forsberg. Forsling I would expect we would sign to a 2 way deal just for depth. Forsberg is at least NHL experienced, so he can be sold as a useful #3 (if Ned is with the Canes) or a #4. I THINK that we are going to keep Forsberg and he will be our #3 goalie, splitting time with Booth in Charlotte. I think this move solidifies Ned as being with the Canes next season. Is that smart? Probably not, depends on who the TBD other Canes goalie is.

But mostly this is a salary dump. Why would we do this? To offset the money spent on buying that first round pick from Toronto? Are we reducing payroll because Aho is going to get $7 million per and Dundon doesn't want to pay out over a set amount of money in payroll? Are we reducing payroll to allow us to both pay Aho AND make a big offer to Matt Duchene? If not Duchene, are we going to go all rogue and offer sheet Patrick Laine, or Mitch Marner, or Brayden Point and that 1st round pick acquisition was our effort to offset potentially losing our 1st round pick next season if the other team doesn't match? Maybe UFAs other than Matt Duchene (Marcus Johansson?)

Could be ANY of those things, from doing things on the cheap to freeing up some money for us to go after legit top 6 scoring talent. Right now we don't know squat about what is really going on and what the plan is. I will close with this...if you are going to dump Calvin de Haan like this, you sure as heck better tread carefully with trading Justin Faulk for a forward. Yeah, we have some organizational depth on D, but we just traded one of our top 6 away, our #6 is going to likely miss part of the season and we are talking about trading away one of our top 4 for a forward. Sorry, but Haydn Fleury, Jake Bean, Trevor Carrick, Rowand McKeown and Gustav Forsling are hardly going to step right in to the spots that were occupied by Calvin de Haan, Justin Faulk, and TVR this past season without a serious downgrade in effectiveness.

We can only hope that there is a lot more coming here and that this wasn't just a salary dump to keep our payroll low. We will have to wait and see what Dundon and Waddell have in mind here.

Oh, and media won't be waiting....they are going to grill us tomorrow about being cheap.
 
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LeBrun is giving us the benefit of the doubt and speculating that this is mostly about freeing up some money for other acquisitions. He said freeing up 'cap space' in his tweet, but I don't think the cap space is the really concern. The actual cash going out to players I suspect is the bigger concern. We are not about to use up the rest of what will be $27.6 million in cap space after we buy out Scott Darling.

Lets hope LeBrun is right and this is s precursor of some bigger things that actually improve the team.
 
LeBrun is giving us the benefit of the doubt and speculating that this is mostly about freeing up some money for other acquisitions. He said freeing up 'cap space' in his tweet, but I don't think the cap space is the really concern. The actual cash going out to players I suspect is the bigger concern. We are not about to use up the rest of what will be $27.6 million in cap space after we buy out Scott Darling.

Lets hope LeBrun is right and this is s precursor of some bigger things that actually improve the team.

Nothing coming back here in the trade is of value or concern, frankly it’s a pure salary dump of $4.5 million x 3. The bigger question and/or concern is indeed what happens next...
 
Honestly it seems like paying to get rid of a bad contract. I agree with Jeffbear that Saarela wasn't going to get a real chance (For whatever reason) I guess we feared the final 3 years on CDH? /shrug...
Oh well. CDH was on our third pair. hurts but not end of the world.. Still I think we could have gotten more value for CDH.
 
One thing that DeCock noted was that de Haan’s contract was structured to be traded after year 3. It was back loaded in year 4 with actual salary of $5.4 million but only a $4.55 million cap hit. So considering that he’s out until December, he’s being traded 18 months early.
 
Saarela I can reluctantly understand, but I actually liked de Haan. After the great draft, this seems like a step backward for the powers that be. Since Fleury seems to be latest in a line of first rounders who can't make the jump, it looks like they're pinning their hopes on Bean to elevate his game enough to earn a good long look. I thought initially that Forsberg would be addressing the "goalies under contract" issue, but if he's also an impending RFA, then he doesn't, and his stats are too underwhelming to even hope that he would be anything other than minor league fodder.
 
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