Tyler Seguin: What If?

It was June 29th, the eve of the 2013 NHL Entry Draft. I was sitting comfortably on my couch, watching the always excellent TSN panel preview the draft and discuss potential trades that were brewing then.

Carolina was shopping their 5th overall pick and were looking for a defenseman in return. Vancouver was working on trading a goaltender (wrongly presumed by many, including myself, to be Luongo) and the Bruins were in serious discussions with a few teams in regards to dealing Tyler Seguin. Oh yeah, and the Flames were one of the teams in on the former 2nd overall pick.

Whoa whoa whoa, back up the bus. The Flames? The CALGARY Flames? At first thought, that was unbelievably exciting and a tantalizing opportunity for a rebuilding franchise. The ability to add a young, potential cornerstone center who was all but guaranteed to breakout sooner rather than later was not an opportunity that presented itself with regularity and needed to be capitalized on immediately. The initial rush of Seguin potentially landing in the Stampede city made me completely disregard any thoughts of what the return might look like and if it might be too much, even for what Seguin offered. There was no mention from any of the Insiders at that point of what the return for Seguin would be from Calgary – or even what the asking price was in general.

So, using the power of Twitter, the Internet and the very limited sources I had, I dug around for anything I could find regarding the Flames and Seguin. In the end, I was able to patch bits and pieces of information I was able to scour up and somewhat narrow it down to the Flames’ 6th overall pick, Johnny Gaudreau and one other piece (I believed it to be a decent roster player) for Tyler Seguin as the bare bones of the deal, at that point. Really, a far cry from the complexity of the eventual Seguin deal to Dallas that involved seven players and no draft picks. I have no way of confirming that the package above was indeed the offer on the table from the Flames, but I imagine it’s not far from the truth.

The talks and rumours were white hot for the extent of the draft but nothing materialized – some speculating due to Flames ownership not allowing the trigger to be pulled. Nonetheless, a little time later the speculation heated up again (sad Note: I decided to write up a piece about Seguin and Calgary at that point – it was a good 2000 words – but woke up the morning after writing it to news of Seguin being shipped to Dallas and my piece becoming ineligible and irrelevant. I was pretty mad at the two organizations for total disregard of my feelings but whatever, I’m over it).

However, Seguin’s eventual deal to Dallas left many of us in Calgary wondering: what if the Flames had moved in on the rumoured deal and traded the 6th overall pick (Sean Monahan), John Gaudreau and a roster player – let’s use Lee Stempniak just for arguments sake – in exchange for Seguin? That would have been quite the hefty package (even without the knowledge of Monahan and Gaudreau’s starts to the 13/14 season) going to Boston and although Seguin has had a good start to this year (12 goals, 23 points in 23 games), would he be worth all that? In the previously mentioned piece I wrote at time, I thought he very well could be:

But now, my opinion has shifted more towards the "no, he’s not" side of the spectrum.

While he has had flashes of dominance – specifically that one night in the Dome where he chewed up the Flames for four goals, he hasn’t been consistently dominant in Texas to this point. The elite potential is definitely still there and he appears to have taken another step towards just that this season. The question is , hough, would he have started the season the same way if he were in Flames silks? Meaning no Jamie Benn to share the heavy lifting with and a bit of a lack of other quality NHLers to be surrounded with. I’m inclined to say no, he wouldn’t have replicated this start in Calgary. In theory, the Flames’ two best wingers with which he could play with would probably be Curtis Glencross and Mike Cammalleri – but Glencross had an atrocious start to the year and Cammalleri didn’t even have a start to the year until late October because of injury.

The package that would’ve been given up is looking even heavier now than it did then. Sean Monahan – the fruit of the 6th overall pick – looks like he just started his third or fourth NHL season rather than his rookie campaign with his mature and impressive play. Johnny Gaudreau is torching the NCAA even more than he did last year and the roster player, arbitrarily assuming it was going to be Lee Stempniak, has been one of the very best forwards to the club to this point. Furthermore, Sean Monahan’s early impression seems to indicate a ceiling similar to that of Seguin‘s, lopsiding the deal in Boston‘s favour even more.

You can’t properly evaluate this potential deal at the moment because, for one it didn’t actually happen and things would play differently with Seguin in Calgary than in Dallas, plus everyone involved still has tons of hockey to play and in the end it’s the hockey they play that determines how the value shakes down.

I would conclude that it’s a good thing for the Flames that this deal fell through, because although Tyler Seguin makes them a better team now, losing Sean Monahan and Johnny Gaudreau would be a big hit to their future. Both posses immense potential and will arrive at their peak when this team is presumably out of the rebuild and onto competitive hockey, meaning their chances to succeed will be higher than that of Seguin right now, with this current line up.

This "what if" question is definitely tons of fun to play around with – although it’s completely useless and meaningless because Seguin‘s a Star for the foreseeable future – and everyone seems to have a different opinion on it.

Would you have pulled the trigger on a 6th overall pick, Gaudreau and roster player for Seguin?