Thoughts on the implications of the Mychan trade

Published 10:40 am Sunday, January 8, 2012

Last night’s trade of enforcer Jesse Mychan to Tri-City, along with Tuesday’s impending traded deadline, got me thinking …

First off, the trade, which saw Mychan sent to Tri-City for a fourth-round pick in the 2013 bantam draft. I think this was a good trade for both teams. Tri-City has aspirations for this season, and Mychan is the type of player who will be a valuable deterrent for a team with a lot of smaller forwards. Meanwhile, the fourth-round bantam pick is a pretty good return for a 19-year-old who was plucked off waivers less than a year earlier, and who would have been stretched to make Everett’s team as an overager next season. Good luck to Jesse with the Americans, as he seemed like a really friendly guy.

This week seems to have gotten the Tips back on the rebuilding track. Everett wandered off that track when trading for 20-year-old defenseman Josh Caron and 19-year-old forwards JT Barnett and Teal Burns in November. But the trade of Mychan, along with Burns being reassigned two days earlier, is getting the Tips closer to looking like a young, rebuilding team again.

The Mychan trade, by the way, doesn’t happen if not for the acquisition of Caron, who’s even more of a deterrent than Mychan. Suddenly the Caron trade makes more sense. As the cost for Caron was also a fourth-rounder, it ended up being effectively a straight swap of Mychan for Caron.

However, Everett is still two players over the 25-player roster limit. One of those will be a goaltender move — I heard Andy Desautels was returning to his junior A team today. But something else still has to give. The best candidate for that is on defense. The Tips are crowded on on the blue line with nine d-men, and it’s a very veteran crew with two 20s, a 19 and two 18s. Saturday against Tri-City the Tips had all their young defensemen in suits (with the exception of Nick Walters, who’s essentially a veteran, too). So some sort of move is likely on defense prior to Tuesday’s trade deadline.

Lastly, I decided to assess Everett’s draft pick situation for the 2012 and 2013 bantam drafts. The Tips had gutted both those drafts in recent years, selling off their future mid-round picks to shore up the team in the short-term. So where are those drafts now? By my calculations, Everett’s pretty much replenished both 2012 and 2013:

– For 2012, the Tips actually have an extra pick in the third round. The Tips have no picks in the fifth and eighth rounds, but that’s not a bad trade off for the extra third-rounder.

– For 2013, Everett is now just out a sixth rounder, having now gotten back into both the third and fourth rounds.

– Everett is still down a fourth rounder for 2014.

It sure hadn’t seemed to me like Everett had done all that much to solve the draft situations for 2012 and 2013, especially given the recent trades for Caron, Barnett and Burns, each of which saw the Tips surrendering draft picks. But the Tips are more or less back to full strength in the upcoming drafts now.