Open For Business: Dorion Listening to Offers on the 7th Overall Pick

After Bill Daly turned over the seventh overall selection at Tuesday’s NHL Draft Lottery to reveal the Ottawa Senators’ logo, it raised the stakes in what was already going to be a fascinating offseason.

Had the Senators moved up to the top of the draft board, the prevailing assumption would have been for the team to keep its pick. At seven, all bets are off.

General manager Pierre Dorion has never been afraid to make a deal and he is certainly not afraid to swing deals using valuable draft currency. Since inheriting his position in 2016, Dorion has made nine separate deals that have included a first or second-round pick.

Five of these trades involved the Senators dealing or acquiring multiple picks to move up or down on draft day. The first transaction Dorion ever made sent a third-round pick with the team’s 2016 first-round pick to New Jersey, so that Ottawa could move up one spot to select centre Logan Brown. In 2019 and 2020, Dorion aggressively packaged multiple selections to move up and respectively grab targets Mads Sogaard and Tyler Kleven.

On two occasions, Dorion traded down. In 2018, the team moved its 22nd overall selection to the Rangers (Ke’Andre Miller) for the 24th (Jacob Bernard-Docker) and 48th overall (Jonathan Tychonick) selections. And, just last year he sent the 42nd overall (Francisco Pinelli) selection to the Kings for the 49th overall (Ben Roger) and a fifth-round pick.

In the four other moves that Dorion made involving these high picks, the Senators moved draft pick capital for players without much success to show for it. Dorion’s first major trade saw the team send a second-round pick with Mika Zibanejad to the New York Rangers. Faced with the prospect of signing Zibanejad to an expensive extension, the Senators cut bait with the young Swede and flipped him for the cost-controlled Brassard. It was a move designed to the team’s competitiveness while cutting costs.

In two separate moves intending to insulate the team’s young core, the Senators sent second-round picks to Arizona and Pittsburgh in exchange for Derek Stepan and Matt Murray in 2020. Stepan was unproductive (1 G, 6 Pts in 20 GP) before a shoulder injury ended his Senators career. Across the last two seasons, Murray has only appeared in 34-percent of the Senators’ games. Between his ineffectiveness and inability to avoid injury, the investment the Senators made in Murray to be their no. 1 goaltender has not panned out.

Following the team’s 2017 Eastern Conference Final appearance, the Senators sent a first-round pick to the Avalanche for Matt Duchene. Although Duchene was a productive player in his time in Ottawa, Dorion misjudged the true talent level of his club and paid a considerably high opportunity cost to acquire a player who would only play 117 games for the organization.

The trade ultimately cost the Senators the fourth overall pick in the 2019 NHL Draft and that pick represented the highest price Dorion’s paid for a talent. If the Senators decide to move the seventh-overall selection, it would be the second.

Historically, it is not often that top-10 picks are moved across the league.

One of the most memorable and lopsided deals in modern history involved the Ottawa Senators. General manager Marshall Johnston infamously pulled the trigger on an Alexei Yashin trade, sending the mercurial centre to the New York Islanders for Bill Muckalt, Zdeno Chara and the second overall pick in 2001 which turned into Jason Spezza.

There have been 15 trades involving top-10 picks since 2005.

Seven of these deals were made by teams that misjudged their talent or were beset by injuries and poor play that sunk their team’s performance and cost these teams valuable picks down the road. Toronto got burned moving two first-round picks for Phil Kessel and it cost them the second overall selection (Tyler Seguin) in 2009 and the ninth pick (Dougie Hamilton) in 2011. Right before Hamilton was selected, Philadelphia used the eighth overall selection to pick Sean Couturier because it dealt Jeff Carter the year prior.

The Senators have been involved in three of these ideals and twice it worked against them. The aforementioned Matt Duchene deal cost them the fourth overall selection in 2018, but the Bobby Ryan trade in 2013 landed the Anaheim Ducks the 10th overall pick in 2014.

Although the Erik Karlsson trade return was not heavily hyped at its outset in 2018, Josh Norris has exceeded all of the expectations that were placed on him. Just as importantly, San Jose’s injuries and some of the league’s worst goaltending caused an aging Sharks squad to plummet in the standings and giftwrap Ottawa a lottery pick that became Tim Stützle.

Five top-10 picks have been moved through by teams trading up or down from their scheduled slot. The Atlanta Thrashers traded the eighth overall selection to slide down not once but twice during the 2005 NHL Draft. In 2007, Sharks general manager Doug Wilson packaged Vesa Toskala and Mark Bell to Toronto for their first (13th overall) and second-round (44th overall) picks. Wilson then proceeded to flip those two acquired picks to St. Louis for the ninth selection that was used on Logan Couture. At the 2008 NHL Draft, the Maple Leafs, Predators and Islanders all shuffled their top-10 selections which helped the Leafs land Luke Schenn with the fifth overall pick.

In terms of teams trading top-10 picks on draft day to land immediate help, there are only four recent examples of it happening.

Carolina dealt the eighth overall pick (Derrick Pouliot) in 2012 to the Pittsburgh Penguins in exchange for Jordan Staal. The centre has spent the last 10 seasons in Carolina and has developed into the team’s captain.

The following year, New Jersey dealt the ninth overall selection (Bo Horvat) to the Vancouver Canucks for goaltender Cory Schneider.

At the 2017 NHL Draft, Arizona sent the seventh overall pick (Lias Andersson) and Tony DeAngelo to the New York Rangers for Antti Raanta and Derek Stepan.

Last year, Arizona acquired the ninth overall pick (Dylan Guenther), Jay Beagle, Louie Eriksson, Antoine Roussel and two additional draft picks Vancouver Canucks for Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Conor Garland.

What really stands out the most from these deals is that the return for a top-10 pick is pretty underwhelming. None of the featured pieces were dynamic talents at the time. Jordan Staal and Cory Schneider were nice pieces to add for teams looking to address a need, but Staal is an ideal third-line centre on a good team. After three good seasons in New Jersey, injuries compounded Schneider’s play and helped derail his career. Antti Raanta and Derek Stepan were solid veteran pieces, but neither player has ever been mistaken for a frontline player. Conor Garland is another solid player, but Ekman-Larsson has been on the decline and is in the diminished return stage of his career. He is a name-value guy who the Canucks rolled the dice on based on his past production. Interestingly, both players are reportedly on the block just one year later.

All of these trades are isolated and simply because the trade returns weren’t necessarily strong then does not mean that the Senators could not maximize the pick’s value now.

I am certainly not against the idea of the Senators moving the pick to get some help, but one of the things that history shows us is that teams aren’t typically trading away high-end talent.

One of the shortcomings of the Dorion era has been the ease in which he’s willing to trade high-value draft selections to take on players who had some very obvious red flags attached to them.

The Senators are certainly not in a position to move assets for short-term solutions. As much as Brady Tkachuk and Thomas Chabot lobbied for some immediate help, Dorion has to ensure that he’s not using one of the team’s most valuable trade chips to acquire short-term help. Too often in the past, the Senators have acquired players without much term left on their deals. Ideally, Dorion can try to acquire a good player who is relatively inexpensive and has a lot of controllable term left.

Teams aren’t exactly looking to move those kinds of players, however.

The Minnesota Wild’s Kevin Fiala is a popular trade target in fan proposals, but the Senators have to be wary of making another Duchene-like deal in which they trade for a player approaching unrestricted free agency or who has a year or two left of restricted free agent status. These kinds of situations give too much leverage to the player and for a smaller market team under current ownership, it puts the organization in a tough spot when it comes time to negotiate an extension.

Fiala would unquestionably be a great fit on the team’s second line, but this summer he’s a restricted free agent and after his next NHL season, he’s eligible for unrestricted free agency. The risk if the Senators acquired him now and at a considerable opportunity cost, is that it would give Fiala all of the leverage in contract negotiations. The Senators would be faced with the prospect of giving Fiala the contract he wants or letting him walk for nothing. In that sense, it would not be that dissimilar to the contract negotiating leverage that Bobby Ryan wielded following his acquisition. From the opportunity cost moved, the loss of Daniel Alfredsson and the team’s desperate need for some positive PR, the organization believed it could not afford to let him walk.

The flip side is that there is no guarantee that the prospect that the Senators would otherwise take at seventh overall will be a dynamic talent either. Teams that have acquired top-10 picks before have wound up with busts like Lias Andersson and Derrick Pouliot.

In saying that, just because the 2022 NHL Draft has not been widely heralded for being headlined by high-end talent, that does not mean that very good players cannot be cultivated from this draft. The highest-rated prospects now will not necessarily be the draft’s class best or most productive pros three, five or ten seasons from now.

Therein lies the risk. If the Senators move the pick, they have to guard against the likelihood that the prospects available at seven will have higher upsides than whatever players could be available to them now.

Is there the risk of that potential going unfulfilled?

Absolutely, and that is the other side of the coin.

The Senators have to make the choice that they believe gives them the opportunity to win during their window of contention when this team’s core is in its prime. Perhaps there is a trade out there that fits that long-term vision and will not cost the Senators a ton of assets or potentially carry negative cap implications down the road.

If that deal is out there, make it.

What the Senators cannot do is simply play for the next year or two. This kind of competitive myopia could disrupt most of the good that has taken time to cultivate.

But, when you have a general manager who does not look like he will be part of the picture when new ownership eventually takes over, he may only care about the here and the now.