The Trade:
Jack Johnson and Oleg Tverdovsky for Eric Belanger and Tim Gleason.
Was Jim Rutherford nuts?
He trades away one of the best NHL prospects for a 30-year old centre who has never scored more than 40 points in a season and was slated to become a UFA at season’s end, along with a defenseman who had scored only 2 goals in his first 120 games, who was known and drafted as an offensive defenseman? What was he thinking?
Jack Johnson has the potential to become a franchise defenseman in the NHL. At 6’1” he isn’t the biggest guy, but he plays a lot bigger. He has an edge to his game, just look at the Canada / U.S. round robin game at the 2006 World Juniors. He has great offensive instincts and can put points on the board.
Carolina drafted him 3rd overall in 2005, behind only Sidney Crosby and Bobby Ryan. They obviously had high hopes for the guy, but dished him off only a year later.
Forget Pittsburgh, they could have had a potential dynasty down in Raleigh. With guys like Eric Staal, Andrew Ladd and Cam Ward, they already won a cup. Imagine if they would have kept Johnson around, that would have been unreal. A potential franchise centre in Staal, a potential franchise winger and elite power forward in Ladd, a potential franchise D-Man in Johnson and a potential franchise goalie in Ward. They would have been set.
I know the Hurricanes were having some trouble getting him signed, but they could have gotten a helluva lot more for him than what they got from Belanger, Tverdovsky and Gleason. A lot of teams would have given up a lot more for him and probably would have overpaid for him.
I have a feeling in a couple of years people will look back and say “Carolina got those two nobodies for one of the top defenseman in the NHL?!”
When the dust settles how do you guys think this trade will look?
[Topic via HockeyForum.com]
Digg - StumbleUpon - Reddit - Del.icio.us - Technorati - Email - Etc...
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
1 response so far ↓
1 CR // Nov 19, 2007 at 6:23 pm
In a worst case scenario Johnson will at least be as good as Gleason and he has the potential to be much MUCH better. Hockey Futures lists him as the number 3 prospect in the world and I believe he was actually higher than that when this went down.
This is such a bad trade that it really makes me think there is more to this story than all parties are willing to divulge. The Kings (who were reasonably deep on the blueline that year) gave up very little in the short term for a huge longterm gain. Perhaps Johnson had informed Hurricanes management that he had no intention of signing with them at all? He seemed more than happy with the prospect of playing 4 years at Michigan until he was traded.
Still, I’m sure they could have gotten more for him. I heard rumors about the Penguins offering Jordan Staal for Johnson straight up the month he was sent to Carolina. That doesn’t seem far fetched considering the Pens wanted to draft a similar d-man (Erik Johnson) instead of Staal that year.
Leave a Comment