I like YouTube. I was tested for ADHD, twice actually, as a kid at the behest of one of my elementary schools because I had a bit of a habit of checking out mentally multiple times throughout the day. One test came back inconclusive and another came back as negative. That was over 20 years ago at this point but I still wonder sometimes if maybe I just got lucky or something on those tests. I mean, I can’t focus for shit.
Anyways, I like YouTube, as I said. One of my favorite things to do on there is watch 85% of the plot but only about 15% of an actual movie. Kind of like a Cliff Notes with talking pictures for the especially dumb. Or maybe it’s better to look at it as more of an updated Reader’s Digest version for movies and tv shows. Do they still have Reader’s Digest? I feel like I always saw them at checkout stands next to Archie comics, crossword compilations, and that one random Disney magazine that always had like Darkwing Duck or Dennis Quaid on the front, but I haven’t seen one in a while and now I’m wondering if they even still exist and if the “Reader’s Digest version” reference is one anyone younger than me even gets. Maybe I’ll ask one of the resident children in the ForHockeyFans slack and see what funny “look” they give me via emoji reactions.
So I spend a lot of time on YouTube, watching random stuff. Mostly it’s scenes from movies and tv shows that I’ve either never seen or saw once a long time ago and it kind of stuck around in my head for some dumb reason, like a cobweb in an attic or an extra serving of salad dressing from a takeout joint in the back of the fridge. Just hanging out, real Guys Being Dudes type of vibes in one of the lesser recesses of my memory waiting for an opportunity to be recalled to action like a journeyman AHL goalie or a veteran bat that never sees the starting lineup.
I say all of this to say that we should spend more time talking about Phillip Seymour Hoffman who was truly one of the finest actors of his generation, and as such has a lot of great performances in otherwise unremarkable movies. Enter one Charlie Wilson’s War (2007). A star studded cast to be sure with the Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts at the top of the billing and the likes of Amy Adams, John Slattery, and the aforementioned Mr. Hoffman. Throughout the movie PSH is trying to tell Hanks’s character, the titular Charlie Wilson, a fable about the Zen Master and the Little Boy. He is, as the use of “trying” would hint, unsuccessful in this endeavor until the end of the film at which point he is finally able to tell Wilson the entire story of the Zen Master and the Little Boy. Here is the clip.
Now Wait Just One Minute…
For my money one of, if not the, best sports commentators is Bomani Jones. Bo came up as not only a sports writer but also a music critic and one of the things he has said time and time again over the last several years regarding music criticism is that the nature of media and media criticism is such that are far more often given reactions than critiques. All too often writers are tasked with having their articles finished quickly because the news/attention cycle is so capricious. It’s hard to say for sure what the appropriate amount of time needed to form a cogent and engaging writing about an album or a movie or a book, to say nothing of the long term ramifications of the work, but I am inclined to side with Bomani in so much as I find it hard to believe 24 hours is the threshold.
I think the same is true when it comes to trades and signings and drafts in pro sports. And that isn’t intended to poo-poo the INSTANT REACTION! pieces that come out after trades or free agent signings are made, or the WINNERS AND LOSERS OF THE DRAFT type articles that are full of names most people had never heard of until they were read aloud at the podium or appeared as a push notification on their phone. Those things are obviously necessary, and we all love knowing who the winners and losers are, even if for no other reason than to mock the losers or assuage the pain of your least favorite team taking your favorite prospect (San Jose Sharks forward William Eklund is a thing that still makes me nauseous).
But to be completely honest, I’m not sure that those are waters I neither can nor care to swim in all that much. Thus the not-at-all-weird-or-suspicious amount of time between the trade and this article. So with that all said, let’s go ahead and talk about that trade now.
The Trade
There it is. Everyone got it? Great, moving on… kidding, kidding. Anaheim sends out a young and promising defenseman in Jamie Drysdale after putting a 2025 second round pick in his pocket and gets back the number five overall pick from the 2022 draft in forward Cutter Gauthier, who is both young and promising himself. A quick rundown of the trade tri-force here:
- Jamie Drysdale: At 5’11” and 183lbs no one is mistaking JD for the second coming of Hal Gill, but that’s certainly to his benefit. An incredibly smooth skater with a high skill level and the hockey sense to match, I think the worst case scenario is he ends up somewhere between Matt Grzelyck and late career Kevin Shattenkirk. That being said it’s far more likely, in my opinion at least, that he finds himself somewhere closer to Keith Yandle with a better defensive game. His skating and sense combined with a readily apparent commitment to improving in his own end leads me to believe that Drysdale will more than likely spend the bulk of his career in a top-four role, hopefully on good to great teams.
- Cutter Gauthier: According to EliteProspects.com 2022 NHL Draft Guide, the Swedish-born American forward walked into the draft at 6’3″ and 201lbs and used every bit of his frame to make an impact, emerging as one of the preeminent power forward prospects in his draft year. With a strong motor, a dominant shot, and a developed two-way game, the Boston College forward is everything Pat Verbeek has said, both explicitly and implicitly, that he wants in a forward prospect. Combine his physical skills with a rather remarkable versatility, both positionally and functionally, and you can see why Verbeek was so willing to move meaningful assets to acquire the former 5th overall pick. EP’s draft guide lists his comparables (a thing they are notoriously and vocally loathe to do by the way) as “shades of Max Pacioretty and Tomas Hertl”, two players Ducks fans are quite familiar with.
- Anaheim Ducks 2025 2nd Round Pick: Perhaps the most interesting part of the deal is the ’25 second rounder that Anaheim sent to Philly in the deal. Why? Because of the context of the pick. The wonderful CapFriendly.com shows a team’s draft picks for a three-year window. Before the trade Anaheim had four second round picks over the next three years, each of their own over that span and Boston’s 2024 second round pick from the Hampus Lindholm trade. The context I alluded to earlier is that they have an extra pick this year, as well as three third round picks this year as well. I wonder if adding say, the Penguins’ third rounder to the Bruins’ late-second rounder would create in aggregate the type of value that the Ducks’ 2025 second has on its own. I wonder which team was more comfortable with the ’25 pick being included. Did Briere want what is likely to be a better pick next year or did Verbeek gamble on the team improving enough next year that the pick should end up somewhere in the mid 40s instead of the early 30s.
“We’ll See”
In a press availability shortly after the trade was completed and announced, Ducks GM Pat Verbeek was clear and concise about why he felt the need to make this trade.
“When I look at our system and our organization, we didn’t have a player like this in our prospect pool,” General Manager Pat Verbeek said last night on Ducks Stream. “There’s not a player like this coming. Gauthier is already two years down the line in his development towards being able to come in and play in the NHL. Based on some of the players that we have up front, I think he’s going to complement them really well and they’re going to complement him really well.”
Ducks Add ‘Shooter and Goal Scorer’ Gauthier in Blockbuster Trade with Philadelphia
And you know what? He’s right! The biggest hole in the Anaheim pipeline at this point is goal scorers. This was something that Bob Murray was trying to correct at the end of his tenure by drafting players like Sasha Pastujov, Jacob Perrault, and Brayden Tracey (as well as Sam Colangelo and Artyom Galimov). Verbeek has also spent draft capitol on goal scoring with the likes of Nico Myatovic, Carey Terrence, and Yegor Sidorov. Still, the lack of premium goal scoring on the roster and in the pipeline was something that the Ducks GM knew needed to be corrected and so here we are. But, these things are rarely ever that simple and there are always questions to be asked about the process.
With the second pick in the 2023 draft the Ducks had their choice of three, maybe four, premium forward prospects. As we know, the team opted for drafting Leo Carlsson and his strong two-way game with the expectation/hope that he would ultimately become this team’s foundational top line center. There was a lot of talk about him having the potential to be a Patrice Bergeron/Sasha Barkov type pivot. However it’s worth noting that the other three players who could have gone in that spot all have higher offensive upsides than Leo does, or at least that is how these players were presented.
Adam Fantilli’s speed and physicality, combined with unreal goal production as an NCAA freshman, led to comparisons of the Nathan MacKinnon, and EP’s “Shades of _” -o-meter listed Tage Thompson and Evgeni Malkin. American forward Will Smith who overcame legitimate concerns about his skating by being one of the most dynamic offensive players in the draft due to his elite hockey IQ, vision, and puck-handling combined with high-end shooting and passing skill. “Shades of J.T Miller and Trevor Zegras” is how EP framed it. Then of course comes the ultimate wild card player in Russian winger Matvei Michkov who fell all the way to seventh overall despite being the only player who could rival consensus first overall pick Connor Bedard for highest ceiling in the draft. Unfortunately a shaky relationship between the KHL and NHL was compounded by the war in Ukraine and plenty of teams were… we’ll say hesitant, to draft a player that has “shades of” Nikita Kucherov and Brad Marchand. Furthermore, players like Zach Benson, Ryan Leonard, Dalibor Dvorsky, and Gabe Perrault were other potential offensive forces available in this draft.
The point I am making, or trying to at least, is that while this trade undoubtedly addresses an area concern for the Ducks, it was not the only way to do so. Leo Carlsson, to this point, has looked every bit the first line center prospect he was touted as and that is not something to be overlooked, especially at this stage in the organization’s rebuild. It should be noted though, that this was not the only way to address this issue and that the opportunity cost here is the loss of a potential point producing top pair right shot defender and a meaningful pick.
Fundamentally, this is about opportunity cost. This move is a bet that seems to be saying that some combination of Zellweger, Mintyukov, and Luneau can create enough offense from the back end that moving on from a point producing right hand defender is reasonable. This move is a bet that at least one of Noah Warren, Drew Helleson, and Tyson Hinds will develop into a legit top four defenseman to balance out the right hand side of the lineup (I know Hinds is a lefty but he has played on his offside at various points). This move is a bet that Cutter Gauthier’s shot and goal scoring can provide a level of punch to the Ducks’ forward corp that makes moving on from an offensive-minded defenseman tenable. This move is a bet that Anaheim will be competitive enough next year to not be in the bottom ten of the standings and hand a mid 30’s pick to a Philadelphia team looking well ahead of their expected recovery timeline. Or maybe its a bet that even if the team finishes in the bottom five and sends the 36th-ish pick in the draft to Philly that the team will have made enough progress on and off the ice that losing the pick won’t matter. It’s a big bet, or maybe it’s a bunch of smaller bets packaged together into a CBO (collective bet obligation). Will it end up paying off? We’ll see…
Epilogue
Ultimately, this trade is going to come down to the two players who were traded for each other. This is not to say that the pick involved is erroneous, but rather that if Cutter Gauthier develops into a legitimate 35+ goal guy year for more years than not over the span of his 20s then the Ducks will be happy to have made the trade. If Jamie Drysdale manages to develop into a Yandle or a Mike Green type player who can the Flyers can run out for 22 to 24 minutes a night and safely plant on their top powerplay unit for seven or eight years, they’ll be ecstatic. None of this is ground breaking analysis I know, but it highlights something that I think is rather funny. What is the second round pick doing here? Is it to offset the perceived value disparity between a young blueliner on his second contract versus an unsigned forward coming off a fantastic showing at World Juniors?
Also a lot of people in the Flyers organization and media made a huge point to note how grateful they were that none of this leaked out before the trade was done. I’m sure that is in part due to the way that a second six NHL team getting punked by a college sophomore would look to people in and around the league, but it is also indelibly linked to the fact that any leaks about Gauthier not signing with the Flyers would mess with his trade value. Verbeek chose to not leak any of this, lessening his leverage but solidifying his seriousness about making this trade.
Does a leak completely tank the deal? Does it change the caliber of player that Briere and Co are able to ask for? I have no idea, but if (for the sake of a hypothetical) we assume that it doesn’t lead to either of those things then it probably means that the Ducks can attach a lesser pick or a secondary prospect to Drysdale instead of the 25 2nd rounder they ultimately wound up including. They have two seconds and three thirds this year that will all (with the exception of their own 2nd rounder as we talked about earlier) fall later in the draft than their second rounder next year. Why is that relevant? Well, Byron Bader compiled the data for every player drafted over a 25 year period to look at how successful picks are by round in terms of getting guys to the league.
So with that in mind let’s take a look at some of the players the Ducks have drafted in the first ten picks of the second round in the last five years: Nico Myatovic (33rd OA), Noah Warren (42nd OA), Olen Zellweger (34th OA), Sam Colangelo (36th OA), and Jackson LaCombe (39th OA).
Now lets look at some of the players that have been taken in the first ten picks of the second round regardless of team going back to the 2018 draft: Andrew Cristall (40th OA), Jagger Firkus (35th OA), Ryan Chesley (37th OA), John-Jason Peterka (34th OA), Luke Evangelista (42nd OA), Arthur Kaliyev (33rd OA), Bobby Brink (34th OA), Nils Hoglander (40th OA), Alexander Romanov (38th OA), Jack Drury 42nd OA).
And neither of those sets include players like Brock Faber (45th OA), Logan Stankoven (47th OA), Tristan Luenaeu (53rd OA), Calen Addison (53rd OA), Sean Durzi (52nd OA), William Cuylle (60th OA), Aatu Raty (52nd OA), or Matthew Knies (57th OA).
Again, if Cutter is the dude they think he is, then you make this deal 10 times out of 10. But if he isn’t or even if he just doesn’t quite get there… there will be questions about why the hell the Ducks had to include a good pick just to add a middle six winger. And if that second rounder turns into a meaningful player down the line, in Philly or elsewhere, those questions are going to be in a tone that is a fair bit less friendly than Pat Verbeek may care for.