Ottawa Senators GM Pierre Dorion appeared on Ottawa’s TSN 1200 AM this morning, offering his take on the circumstances leading up to the Alex DeBrincat trade to Detroit. TSN posted a summary of the main points of Dorion’s 27-minute interview:
“I don’t look at it as the price we paid versus what we got in return because the situations are totally different,” Dorion said on TSN1200 Tuesday morning. “One guy was two years out from UFA, when we acquired him, and he gave us a good year of hockey. A lot of things could have gone a bit differently for us, a bit better luck with injuries. Maybe we make the playoffs and people don’t look at it that way. We got a pretty good player for a year and we feel we maximized our return. Let’s look in 3-5 years if that player we take in the first round is better than the player we would’ve taken at No. 7.”
DeBrincat, 25, scored 27 goals and 66 points in his only season with the Senators, finishing fourth on the team in both categories. Despite the solid season from DeBrincat, the Senators missed the playoffs by six points.
Dorion added that it was always the goal to re-sign the forward to a long-term contract but DeBrincat and his team made it clear that he wished to play elsewhere.
“It was always our goal to sign Alex long term. We talked to him at training camp and [his team] said ‘let’s see how he likes it’,” said Dorion. “About halfway through the year we reached out to them and they said ‘We thought your team would be a bit better from the start of the year.’
“Alex’s body language in the exit interview told me enough. Being around a long time, I told [head coach D.J. Smith] ‘he doesn’t want to be here’. When I got back from the World Championships his agent called me and said ‘we’re not going to sign long-term with you guys.”
Dorion said he reached out to a list of nine teams provided by DeBrincat and gave several teams permission to negotiate a long-term contract with the two-time 40-goal scorer. However, Dorion found finding a trade partner difficult, as DeBrincat did not wish to sign a long-term deal with certain teams and believes he found the best deal he could for the organization.
“At the end of the day, Detroit kept calling and you’re almost just negotiating with one team. And you have to get the best return and do what’s best for the organization,” said Dorion. “What made it a bit more difficult is that if you had a deal close with teams and Alex said he wouldn’t sign there, it made it difficult for us. We were pretty much negotiating with one team.”
