MTPS: Draft Day Trades—The Winners, The Losers, and the WTF

Fun fact—most trades aren't meant to have winners or losers.

A good trade means each team gets what it wants and usually both sides have to endure a little bit of pain in the deal. Think of it this way: If you take your family to Disney World, you're dropping around $10,000 for a week of fun. That's a lot. And, by the same token, when you look back on that trip five years down the road, you're not thinking about the $10,000; you're thinking about the fun you had with your family. That makes it a fair trade.

Now, that's the ideal. But we do not live in a world of the ideal. We live in the real world, and in the real world there are some whoppers out there that made some teams better, some teams worse, and some fans wondering if their general manager had been replaced by Pookie from New Jack City.

Here are the winners, the losers, the WTF, and more.

The Winners

New York Rangers

I have to start here as much for what they didn't do as what they did do. Chris Drury often gets dragged for the notion that he either gets taken to the woodshed by other general managers in trade deals or that he allows rumors about potential trades to hang around like a fart in an elevator without being able to close the deal. Drury did a lot to dispel both of those narratives.

There was a lot of smoke that the Rangers were one of two teams in on Anaheim Ducks' center Mason McTavish over the last several days. Reportedly, the Rangers were willing to offer a player, but would not part with any draft picks in return for the 23-year old. Now, don't get me wrong, McTavish is a good player, and we don't know what player the Rangers were offering. But it was clear that Chris Drury was not going to budge off of his offer and so McTavish went to St. Louis for a pair of first round picks (we'll get to that later).

So, Drury was not willing to overpay for McTavish. That's reat. And then he followed up by, seemingly out of nowhere, completing a trade for one of the top young snipers in the game in Pavel Dorofeyev.

Dorofeyev is probably the best pure shooter the Rangers have had since Marian Gaborik, he's 26, a plus skater, a good defender, and is now signed for seven years at just slightly more than Alex Tuch's $10.5 million per year contract. Oh, and the Rangers got him for a late first round pick, a third round pick, and a lottery protected first round pick two years from now. That's a tidy bit of work for Drury.

Buffalo Sabres

The Sabres turned Bowen Byram and the chronically injured Jordan Greenway into the fourth overall pick and Olen Zellweger. That's very good. Now, they still have a lot to do to make sure that the trades of Byram and Tuch don't send players like Tage Thompson looking for the offramp. But this is a solid start.

Boston Bruins

Much was made about JJ Peterka having a "down year" for the Utah Mammoth. Um, his down year still resulted in 25 goals and dominant possession numbers. Clearly, the situation wasn't what he or the Mammoth wanted and credit the Sabres for being there to pounce. The price was roughly the same as what the Rangers gave up for Dorofeyev: the 23rd pick in this year's draft and the Florida Panthers top-10 protected pick in 2028. A top line of Peterka - Pavel Zacha - David Pastrnak could be quite good for the Bruins.