Agreed. It's not a given that with excess players at a given position, they can get the equivalent at a position of scarcity. It's not a perfect market. GMs sniff weakness and exploit it.
Other GMs can't stop a team from drafting who they want. They can refuse to trade. Teams mostly overvalue their own prospects, just as we do on the board, so it's tough to make an even trade for prospects.
The prospects who get traded are normally guys who have fallen out of favor or who don't fit. It can work out, sometimes you get Suzuki instead of Glass, but it pretty much depends on another team being unable to evaluate their own players. Lots of teams have dealt with the habs for this reason. The habs traded away a bunch of guys below value starting in the late '90s, and they haven't done it that often but pretty much every GM since Houle had a terrible trade of a player they hadn't evaluated correctly.
You have to be careful of teams perceived to be in tough spots. The trades for Gomez and Drouin were supposed to be steals because the players were being dumped.
High draft picks are amazing value. Most draft picks, and especially most out of the top 10, end up being worthless. If you can evaluate the picks correctly both before and after making them, you have a huge advantage. Tinordi could have been great value if the habs had dealt him within a year of drafting him.
Hughes will probably make at least one major mistake in the next year or two. It's unavoidable with draft picks, too much uncertainty. He looks to be playing the percentages correctly, though. Dealing late firsts for skilled young guys with upside makes sense, dealing the same picks for a pretty good older player, maybe not so much. It shouldn't really affect the calculation if one or both of the picks becomes a star, like Debrincat, but it certainly emphasizes that the trade was maybe not great value.
I guess, in short, I agree that if you have way too many players at a position it is not easy to trade the ones that you want to trade for good value at other positions. Perceived value from other GMs is the player's value to you, if you are trying to trade him that value drops.
