We've got our first blockbuster trade of the 2021 NHL season, as the Columbus Blue Jackets have sent disgruntled center Pierre-Luc Dubois along with a 2022 third-round pick to the Winnipeg Jets in exchange for disgruntled winger Patrik Laine and forward Jack Roslovic.
Laine and Dubois arrived on the NHL radar simultaneously, as the No. 2 and No. 3 picks, respectively, in the 2016 NHL draft. Heading into this season, there were murmurs that both were unhappy with their current situation. Now, they each get a fresh start where the other began his NHL career.
How did both GMs do in this swap of stars? Here are our grades for the deal.
Columbus Blue Jackets: A-
This is the Monkey's Paw of NHL trades, in which two players wished for a change of scenery, got their wishes granted and now face the unexpected consequences of their desires.
Be careful what you wish for, part one: Patrik Laine wanted out of Winnipeg partly because he wasn't given a star center with whom to play. So the Jets traded him to Columbus ... for the closest thing to a star center they had. Whoops.
While this might not be the ideal scenario for Laine, it's an ideal one for the Blue Jackets, if you agree with GM Jarmo Kekalainen that Laine does more offensively than just score goals. Because he's going to have to drive a line in Columbus, given what they have at center: Max Domi, Alexandre Texier (who has some upside), Mikko Koivu, Riley Nash and, depending on how they use him, Roslovic. Laine quietly had his most productive season in 2019-20 at 0.93 points per game, so perhaps his playmaking is underrated.
The good news is that he's pretty adept at scoring goals, too. It's not a stretch to say that Laine is the best pure goal-scoring winger the Jackets have had since Rick Nash asked out of Columbus. He has 60 goals in his last 151 games. His goals per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 in that span is 0.85, putting him in the neighborhood of Matthew Tkachuk and Jonathan Huberdeau.
His power-play production in that span is 2.71 goals per 60 minutes, ranking him 14th in the NHL. Dubois was a lot of things, but an X factor on the power play wasn't one of them. Laine joins a unit that's ranked 28th in the NHL over the past two seasons (16.0%) and makes it immediately more dangerous.
Kekalainen knows Laine well, going back to when the winger was a teenage prospect in Finland. With him and Koivu acting as elder statesmen, that's a good environment for Laine, who, again, is just 22.
Getting the Jets to pick up 26% of Laine's salary for this season to make the money work is a bonus, too.
Laine's defensive game has been rightfully pilloried. The analytics show he can be a liability at 5-on-5. It's understandable, as the NHL has been littered with gifted scoring wingers who eventually grow into more complete players, from Alex Ovechkin to Taylor Hall to Vladimir Tarasenko. But it earns added intrigue when it's a John Tortorella team that Laine is joining, as this is a coach who does not suffer through a lack of defensive effort. He's also a coach who hasn't exactly had a sterling relationship with offensively oriented wingers, as Marian Gaborik has been hinting at during the Dubois saga.
Roslovic, who signed a two-year deal with a $1.9 million cap hit, is more than a throw-in. The Columbus native -- which Kekalainen swears was not a factor in his acquisition -- is a speedy playmaker who loves having the puck. His positional versatility, playing center and wing, helps this lineup. There's some upside to him, although a top-six role might be asking too much.
Kekalainen had been working on a Dubois trade for a while, but the last week clearly showed something had to give. Tortorella benched him on Monday for part of a period and then stapled him to the bench near the end of the first period on Thursday night, as Dubois didn't see another shift for the rest of the game. He would have been a scratch on Saturday were it not for the trade.
It's a bummer in one sense: The Jackets thought they had found the true No. 1 center that's frankly eluded them during the franchise's history. That search begins anew. But in Laine, Kekalainen gets the player he actually wanted in 2016, when Dubois went third to the Jackets in the draft and Laine went No. 2 overall to the Jets. This is not a short-term play. "No worries at all [about keeping him]. We have his rights for this year and two more years after this," said Kekalainen of Laine.
Losing a top center hurts. They don't grow on trees. But neither do 22-year-old wingers with the goal-scoring brilliance of Laine. For a forced hand, Columbus played it rather well, with a trade that helps them now and could really benefit them later if Laine excels.
Winnipeg Jets: B
Be careful what you wish for, part two: One of the reasons Dubois reportedly wanted out of Columbus was for a "larger stage" than the one provided by the Blue Jackets. Maybe "playing in Canada" fulfills that obligation; otherwise, Dubois got his wish granted and was shipped to the smallest market in the Great White North, albeit one with a fervent fan base.
"To get a top center in this environment is simply unheard of. We wouldn't have moved a Patrik Laine for someone that didn't fit the criteria of a top centerman or top defenseman," said Jets GM Kevin Cheveldayoff.
I'm in the camp that he's right on the borderline between a terrific No. 2 and a burgeoning No. 1. His 10-points-in-10-games performance in the playoff bubble last season artificially inflated his stock -- Cheveldayoff said on Saturday that if you want to understand Pierre-Luc Dubois, you should look at those clips. Which is fine, except No. 1 centers do it for more than 10 playoff games.
He's not there yet. The question is whether he'll develop into one, or if this is Ryan Johansen 2.0: a solid center, with great numbers as a young player, who never could quite make the leap to being on that elite center tier.
The good news is that the Jets already have one of those already in Mark Scheifele, who is signed through 2024. Dubois can slide in behind him and excel, rather than having to shoulder the expectations of being a No. 1. For the Jets, that's a heck of a one-two punch at center in a division with its share of them. Plus, it allows them to shift Paul Stastny down to a No. 3 center spot, a much better fit, or have coach Paul Maurice move one of them to the wing.
"The depth and the size that we have in the middle right now is going to be the strength of our organization," said Cheveldayoff.
Dubois, 22, provides great size, at 6-foot-3. He's fast and can bring a power element to his game. He's not great on faceoffs, and comes to a team that's below league average in the dot. As mentioned, he's been curiously ineffective on the power play. I guess we'll see if that's an indictment of Dubois or the Columbus special teams.
Dubois has 111 points in his last 157 games, and has 33.2 goals scored above replacement to Laine's 24.3 since the 2017-18 season. He's been a better even-strength scorer in that span than Laine, too, with 43 goals to Laine's 37 and 92 points to Laine's 76 points at 5-on-5.
Laine is an elite goal-scorer, but his departure from the wing doesn't impact that position like the loss of Dubois hurts the Jackets at center. With Kyle Connor, Blake Wheeler, Nikolaj Ehlers, Andrew Copp, potentially Stastny and with prospect Cole Perfetti on the way, there's a lot for Dubois to work with here.
This was the Jets making the most of an untenable situation. Roslovic was done there. Laine's agents have expressed that it would be best for their client to move on, so he was done there, too. While moving Laine for a top-pairing defenseman might have helped this team the most, there's no question that having Dubois and Scheifele up the gut for the foreseeable future makes this a much better team. Not to keep hearkening to the bubble, but we saw what happened when Scheifele went down with an injury. Even with Stastny added, this team was wafer-thin at center. Now it's not. They've filled the second-greatest need of the roster.
So we'll give this trade a B for Winnipeg because of two caveats. The first is that Cheveldayoff was more hopeful than convinced that Dubois would sign a long-term deal after this current two-year contract is over -- but the Jets would still control his rights. The second is that Winnipeg traded the player with the highest upside in this deal.
Laine scored 140 goals as a Jet before moving on to another team at 22 years old. Teemu Selanne had scored 147 goals by age 25 before the original Jets traded him away. Needless to say, he'd score a few more in his career. And so will Laine.