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Fun Friday: The five types of stupid trade proposals

Posted on by Eamon Smith

Welcome back to Fun Friday, the show that isn’t a show. I’m your host with the most, Eamon Smith. I apologize for last week’s hiatus; I was just settling in with Broad Street Hockey and didn’t have a lot of time to spare. Now, today’s weirdness:

The Five Types of Stupid Trade Proposals

With the Nashville Predators rumored to be in trade talks recently, there’ve been some mind-boggling trades bandied about by various fanbases. Nashville fans are new to the idea of being sellers of key assets, so I figured it would be good to publish a guide to the wild world of absurd mock trades.

Type 1: The Lowball

This is the typical mistake of a casual fan who doesn’t have any idea what trades cost. The happy-go-lucky fan draws up something arbitrary and goes “yeah, that seems about right” before offering you some belly button lint and a cherry stem for your Mickey Mantle rookie card. The results are absolutely hilarious.

The people making these are usually spitballing, but sometimes you’ll find a more easily baited breed that gets mad when you call them out. That’s where the hilarity ensues; just sit back and wait for the increasingly ridiculous takes.

My absolute favorite of this type of trade is the “uh, d’ya think this guy is worth a first-round pick, or do you think we can get away with just giving up a second?” This is particularly awesome when the player in the discussion is a star.

Shockingly, I really don’t think you’d be able to squeeze out of dealing a first-round pick for Filip Forsberg. Sorry about that, LA folks.

Type 2: All our players are great, all of yours stink

Now we’re getting to my home turf. It’s time to look at some Flyers fans, baby. This is typically a symptom of a big-market team that has a nice prospect pool drastically overvaluing all of their players while undervaluing guys from everywhere else. I’ll let Broad Street Hockey and On The Forecheck commenter Bud in TN give a good example:

This was a reply on an Ekholm-related article that garnered responses like this:

The key traits that separate this archetype from the typical lowballer is the belligerent tone, the outward statement of lotto-ticket prospects being worth more than a good established NHLer, and, most importantly, the claim that the player you like isn’t nearly good enough to be worth that much.

I love Flyers Twitter so much during this time of year. Things get zany in a hurry.

Style 3: Here, have this pile of… stuff?

This is where fans employ the strategy of “if we combine a bunch of different types of things, maybe it’ll be worth something?” and dial it up to eleven. I call this the Captain Planet method: with their powers combined, Sam Poulin, Jordy Bellerive, a fourth- and a fifth-round pick are basically Filip Forsberg. If a GM got a phone call from another GM and received an offer like this, they’d probably either laugh until passing out or tell you to never bother them again.

The absolutely chaotic nature of these types of trades is difficult to surpass. The mental gymnastics going on in the minds of fans to justify this kind of stuff is truly astounding.

Type 4: I don’t want this anymore, I want that

As a famous starfish once said, “Let’s just take Jakub Voracek’s contract and push it somewhere else!” In all seriousness, this is where the takes reach their zenith. Flyers fans in particular have been guilty of packaging up all of the stuff they don’t like, rolling it into a ball, and then saying it’s a fair offer for, say, I dunno, Jack Eichel.

I legitimately died laughing when I saw that proposal. Sammy Morin was swapped to forward earlier in the year because the Flyers were that desperate to give him an opportunity to crack the lineup (i.e. he wasn’t good enough as a defender to earn a role). Robert Hägg has been one of the league’s worst defensive regulars and Erik Gustafsson is a gigantic tire fire on an expiring deal. Seems like sensible value for a top-pairing defenseman, if you ask me.

Type 5: We’re actually doing you a favor, because we’re nice

This poll outcome. That is all.

Thank you to @AngryPredsFan on Twitter for curating a lot of the more bonkers ones that I’ve seen floating around lately. Go give him a follow if you haven’t already. Happy Friday folks, and as always, go Preds.

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