The New Jersey Devils have the biggest trade chip in the league in Taylor Hall right now. With so much speculation running rampant right now, how can the trades of the past tell us how the Devils will fair in the future?
The New Jersey Devils season went about as bad as it possibly could have. Cory Schneider and Mackenzie Blackwood were not nearly as good as they should have been. John Hynes had to get fired because his message just didn’t stick anymore. All the offseason moves didn’t elevate the Devils to the point we thought it would. Now, the Devils sit at the bottom of the Metropolitan Division, more than ten points out of the final Wild Card spot.
It’s become clear that this situation does not bode well for the prospects of re-signing Taylor Hall. The Devils superstar wants to go to a winner, and despite Shero’s best efforts, it’s not happening here, at least not right now.
So, that means it’s time to start looking into what the Devils could get in a Hall trade. In reality, we’ve been looking at that all season after they went winless in their first six games. We’ve heard the rumors, and looked at who would be good to get from the likes of the Edmonton Oilers, Calgary Flames, Montreal Canadiens and more.
It feels like a Hall trade is going to come sooner rather than later. With that being said, we felt the need to look into past trades for superstars to see what teams got in return. We only looked at trades that involved some of the top players in the league while they were still in their prime. The trade also had to have happened while the season was going on.
With all that said, let’s look at the first trade on our list.
Mark Stone Trade
This one is a little obvious, so we won’t spend a ton of time on it (a lot of people have talked about this trade), but we couldn’t just ignore it entirely. Stone was a great winger on a bad team. He was at the end of his contract, and the team trading for him would be possibly risking losing him in the offseason. Stone signed with the Golden Knights after the Ottawa Senators traded for him, so that helped the return.
The Senators got defensive prospect Erik Brannstrom, Oscar Lindberg and a 2020 2nd round pick. Lindberg left the team in the offseason to sign with a club in Switzerland. That means the Senators got Brannstrom and a pick in next year’s NHL Draft. It’s a decent return since Brannstrom is pegged to be a really good defenseman. He’s really struggling in his first year in the NHL, and the Sens were forced to send him to Belleville, so that’s a scary proposition.
The Stone trade looked like a really good deal at the time for the Senators, and it’s way too early to judge Brannstrom’s NHL prospects in his first season, but so far this is a huge win for Vegas. With that said, Stone isn’t even comparable to Hall. Hall’s ceiling is a lot higher than Stone’s. Stone is a great player, but at Hall’s peak he’s an MVP candidate (and one time winner). The Devils would want more of a sure thing, or the closest thing to it, in a Hall trade.