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The Arizona Coyotes Trade Rumors Are Out Of Hand, Part I

By Catherine Silverman

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The Arizona Coyotes are not having a fire sale

The Arizona Coyotes are going to ‘blow the team up’.

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    • Sound familiar?

    This is what Pierre LeBrun said not two full weeks ago, when the team was in the first few games of an impressive losing streak rivaled only by those of the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Buffalo Sabres.

    Since then, he’s apologized for the inflammatory tone of his announcement — but despite his prediction that the team is simply looking to trade the necessary pieces to stock their toolshed for years to come, we’re still seeing trade rumors pointing to the entire team being on the trading block.

    Is this the smart move?

    When the Buffalo Sabres literally blew up their franchise, there wasn’t a lot left to be proud of.

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    • The team had never won a Stanley Cup (although they’d come closer than any other team without a championship in NHL history – literally), but they had been an easy team to cheer for — but mismanagement of assets had left the team disjointed and ill-fitting. Not unlike the Edmonton Oilers, San Jose Sharks, and Toronto Maple Leafs are today, the Sabres were a team that could no longer swap around a few players and earn their way back to a playoff berth.

    That’s not the Arizona Coyotes.

    With one of the youngest blue lines in the league, the Coyotes are bound to struggle for the next two to three seasons down the road. They’ll undoubtedly get better with each passing birthday for the team’s young corps, but for now, expect them to experience the requisite growing pains.

    Shane Doan is getting older and Mike Smith started off the season posting some pretty impressive regression statistics — the Arizona Coyotes at their worst looked like Toronto minus Jonathan Bernier. Things weren’t pretty.

    The team is well-balanced, though — and although they’re in the midst of a young player phase-in movement, there’s little on the Arizona Coyotes to be ashamed of.

    So why are we talking about trading any player a good price is offered for?

    Passion clouds perspective; this isn’t something that anyone is immune from.

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    • Along those lines, losing sucks. It may be a learning experience for Connor Murphy, Brandon Gormley, Philip Samuelsson, Lucas Lessio, Tobias Rieder, Michael Stone…. they may be discovering how to work together to become a playoff-contending hockey team, but it’s a painful process. We watched the Calgary Flames go through it, we watched the Columbus Blue Jackets go through it, and now we’re watching the Arizona Coyotes go through it.

    The team needs to trade someone; may it be Antoine Vermette, Keith Yandle, or Zbynek Michalek, it needs to happen.

    Part of building a good, winning team, though – that’s all asset management. Selling off every player other teams offer you money for? That’s bad asset management.

    Criticizing how others propose to run the team isn’t good game analysis, though — it’s just empty criticism. Who should stay, and who should go, based on the idea of future asset management:

    Martin Hanzal: Stay
    Best Probable Return: draft pick, comparable player for more money in a salary dump scenario

    Martin Hanzal is mildly injury-prone, but most players his size are — apart from Zdeno Chara, you’d be hard-pressed to find a six and a half foot man who doesn’t pull a muscle a time or two. That’s not bad playing, that’s just being a giant person.

    On a team that’s been getting disappointingly smaller in a large, powerful Western Conference, though — Martin Hanzal is an asset. He’s young enough that he’ll probably be around for a while, and he played well with both Henrik Samuelsson and the prodigal Max Domi this pre-season. On a team that will need a few veterans around, he’s a good one to hold on to.

    Antoine Vermette: Go
    Best Probable Return: prospect + second round pick

    I wanted to see Antoine Vermette take the third round pick acquired from the Devan Dubnyk trade and ship off for Toronto, sending Tyler Bozak to Arizona.

    Now, though, it looks like the Leafs are entering full strip-down mode; they’ve finally figured out that it’s not the coach, it’s *probably* the GM, and he’s put together a kind of ill-fitting roster. Tyler Bozak isn’t going anywhere for a player over twenty-five, much less nearing thirty-five.

    The best the Coyotes can get for Vermette is probably going to be a prospect and a draft pick, but that’s worth it for the future. The team can then sign a center in free agency if they need to, or even swap around for someone that isn’t working out — worst case, the Leafs really DO have a fire sale and the Coyotes collect either Bozak or Nazem Kadri later.

    Keith Yandle: stay
    Best Probable Return: prospect (low probability of success) + first round pick

    Keith Yandle could be immensely valuable for the Coyotes leading up to the trade deadline, but the team’s average age on defense is currently one of the youngest in the league — even if they can get someone like Noah Hanifin in the draft, it might not be worth it to send him packing.

    With Max Domi, Henrik Samuelsson, and even possibly Christian Dvorak headed to the team next season, the Coyotes have the potential to be fairly good — but if they employ a defensive lineup all under the age of 25, things will go south rather quickly. Even the youth movement poster children, the Calgary Flames, employ veterans on defense. The Coyotes can’t afford to get rid of Keith Yandle unless another team is willing to send an older player their way. The youngest they should be willing to accept is Matt Bartkowski of the Boston Bruins, who is 26.

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