The Blue Jackets made a small trade yesterday acquiring Ryan MacInnis from the Coyotes for Jacob Graves and a conditional sixth round pick.
The condition on the pick is if MacInnis plays 20 games in the NHL this season the pick becomes a fifth rounder in 2020.
MacInnis was a second round pick in the 2014 draft so he does have some pedigree. However he has not come close to living up to it. His skills never matched his draft position. He’s a 6’3 centre and is the son of Hockey Hall of Famer Al. Those were the big reasons why he was drafted where he was, as his production was subpar. In 66 games in the OHL he only scored 37 points. He had a breakout offensive season two years later, scoring 81 points in 59 games, though he played on a line with two super talented wingers in Adam Mascherin and Jeremy Bracco, who carried him offensively.
MacInnis has spent the past two seasons in the AHL where he has amassed 31 points in 129 games. This is not an NHL player; MacInnis at this stage looks like a third line AHL player at most. Giving up Jacob Graves for him is fine, Graves is an ECHL defencemen and if the trade was one-for-one it would have been the typical minor league player swap. But it’s not. Columbus inexplicably included a pick in this trade.
Sure it’s only a sixth round pick but you only get seven picks. Wasting them in trades like this is horrible asset management. MacInnis has so little upside; the team would be much better off taking a player in the sixth round. Again the odds of finding an NHL player that late in the draft is slim, but the odds of MacInnis being an NHL player are just as slim. With a sixth rounder there is potential to find a gem. The Jackets have had success with sixth round picks, and were not just talking about Cam Atkinson. They have made four picks in the sixth round in the last two seasons. Johnathan Davidsson has emerged as one of the better prospects in the system.
The Jackets liked Tim Berni so much they opted to trade a 2019 fifth round pick for a 2018 sixth round pick so they could select him. This is supposed to be a draft and develop organization; it’s pretty hard to do that when you don’t have picks to draft with.
Wasting assets in July leads to problems in June.
The Jackets have already shipped out their second, fifth and sixth round pick for this season. To show for it they have MacInnis, Berni and no longer have David Clarkson. This has been a reoccurring theme for the Jackets over the past three seasons. They traded away a ton of picks and the system is feeling the effects. The prospect pool is weak which hurts when you want to try and trade for a big name player like an Erik Karlsson. The AHL team was horrendous which affects development of players. It hurt the NHL team in the sense that they didn’t have suitable players to be called up. There was no depth in the organization.
The draft is a lottery, the more tickets you have the better chance to have to win. The Jackets need to stop giving away chances. Draft picks are valuable even late ones. If they are to be traded they should be used in trades for NHL players, as we saw at the deadline with Mark Letestu and Ian Cole. Trading them for a player, who if everything breaks right projects as someone who might play a few games on the fourth line, is bad asset management.
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