The Athletic’s Ottawa Senators correspondent, Ian Mendes, passes judgment on the Alex DeBrincat trade from a Senators perspective this morning:
Not all trades are created equally, which leads us to Alex DeBrincat and his departure from the Ottawa Senators. There are rare instances in hockey where there is no “bad guy” per se in a trade. And the DeBrincat deal to Detroit might be one of those transactions.
Consider that DeBrincat never asked to be traded to Ottawa last summer. And he didn’t exactly demand a trade out of Ottawa this summer either.
And these two sentences seem to perfectly encapsulate DeBrincat’s brief stay in Ottawa. DeBrincat wasn’t an explosive and dynamic sniper in Ottawa. But he also wasn’t an abject failure either.
He scored 27 goals and 66 points, while carrying a minus-31 rating. Any positive element of his game seemed to be mitigated by a negative one. In many ways, it was a zero-sum game during his tenure in Ottawa.
And that’s how a lot of Ottawa fans might classify the return on his trade with the Red Wings. Not terrible — but certainly not great either.
Continued (paywall), and Mendes argues that the Senators will be judged on what GM Pierre Dorion does with the rest of his cap space over the balance of this summer…
