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Dorion's Best Trade is....

July 6, 2020, 7:20 PM ET [64 Comments]
Michael Stuart
Ottawa Senators Blogger • RSSArchiveCONTACT
Voting has closed. The results are in. Pierre Dorion’s best trade as General Manager of your Ottawa Senators is… the deal that sent Erik Karlsson to the San Jose Sharks! In a lopsided final matchup against the J-G Pageau deal, the Karlsson trade claimed more than 80% of the vote to cruise to an easy victory.

When you think about the key pieces that came back in the Karlsson deal, it’s easy to see why it was voted the winner. Josh Norris is a top-tier prospect in the system. Rudolfs Balcers still looks promising. Dylan DeMelo was excellent during his tenure with the Sens. Chris Tierney provides competent NHL minutes at an affordable price. Oh, and then there’s the picks. Getting the third overall selection in this year’s draft as part of the deal is just icing on the cake. Calling this move a franchise-defining one isn’t an overstatement at all. Dorion pulled the trigger on trading this generation’s best defender, and brought back a haul in return. He needed to get the deal right, and by all accounts he did.

With all that said, it did take a lot of luck for this trade to look as it does today. When the deal was made, people probably expected the San Jose pick to sit in the mid-20s, not the top three. Nobody could have seen Norris’ mammoth leap forward coming. DeMelo was a relative unknown before arriving in Ottawa and suiting up next to Chabot. At the time it was made, this deal really looked like a quality for quantity move from Ottawa’s perspective. Very few were calling it a slam-dunk win for Dorion.

The argument in the preceding paragraph led to some great discussion in the comments section in the last blog. As first championed by sensarmy_11, I’m partial to the argument that, even if the Karlsson deal ended up providing a better result for Ottawa, the Pageau deal was a finer piece of “GMing” from Dorion. In the Pageau deal, he took a third-line centre with an expiring contract and turned him into an abundance of riches in the draft capital department. It’s the kind of move that really smart GMs make, and Dorion executed it to perfection. By taking advantage of Pageau’s scorching hot start to the year, and finding the right vulnerable trade partner, Dorion extracted value that few would have thought possible when the 2019-20 season began.

Regardless of which way you voted, it was nice to spend time talking about good trades that Dorion has made over the last number of years. There has been an abundance of bad news stories for the Senators in recent memory, but lots of Dorion’s trades have actually set this team up nicely for future success.

As always, thanks for reading.
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