Talk about a simulation.
Hockey insider Jeff Marek dropped a bombshell on today’s episode of his show The Sheet. According to sources, in the summer of 2019, the Edmonton Oilers and Tampa Bay Lightning were in talks about a possible trade of Leon Draisaitl for Nikita Kucherov.
Most fans would react to this news the same way as his co-host Greg Wyshynski: “What? Stop, no way!”
Fair enough. The trade would have been unprecedented. Kucherov was coming off a monster season: 41 goals and 128 points, the first 120-point season since Sidney Crosby in 2006-07. Kucherov obviously won the Hart and Art Ross Trophies, leading the Lightning to one of the best regular seasons of all time.
Of course, we all know how this season ended for Tampa Bay: a shocking and embarrassing first-round sweep at the hands of the Columbus Blue Jackets. Kucherov didn’t do himself any favors by getting suspended for the deciding fourth game.
Draisaitl was coming off a season of his own, surpassing 50 goals and 100 points for the first time on an Oilers team that finished with the seventh-worst record in the league. Draisaitl would of course win the Hart and the Art Ross the following year.
The contracts have aligned. Draisaitl, two years his junior, was entering the third year of a contract that suddenly looked like one of the NHL’s biggest bargains at $8.5 million a year. Kucherov, meanwhile, was about to enter the first year of an eight-year contract worth $9.5 million annually.
The Oilers pushed for a tough negotiation, however, as Marek also said they wanted 21-year-old Anthony Cirelli in the deal. Cirelli had just completed his first full NHL season and already looked like a potential star in the making as a talented young two-way center. According to Marek, this is where the negotiations broke down and, obviously, the exchanges never came to fruition.
This would have been one of the most important trades in NHL history, and it seems even crazier in hindsight since Draisaitl and Kucherov have only gotten better since the summer of 2019.
What kind of point totals could Kucherov and Connor McDavid have put together? Would the Lightning win back-to-back Stanley Cups with Draisaitl in their fold? Such a seismic trade could have completely changed the trajectories of these two franchises, or changed nothing at all.
But we’ll never know, because it never happened, and Oilers and Lightning fans can take solace in the fact that they both ended up with very good players in the end.
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