Girard ended up being the best asset of the deal and he didn’t even come from Ottawa.
Yeah, but I think it's fair to consider it as the return we gave them since they used Turris from us to get those pieces.
Girard was probably viewed like a 1st round pick at the time. He was taken in the mid 2nd round a year earlier and had made a lot of progress during his +1 year, to the point that he was considered NHL ready.
We almost got saved because apparently Nashville was unhappy with Colorado's demands and everything fell apart by a deadline that was imposed for the trade. If I recall, Dorion said the A-GMs worked hard to get it back on track. It's a real shame, because maybe if we had a week or two delay before teams circling back, we go on a similar losing skid and do not make that trade.
Despite the narrative that the rebuild was decided on after the skid, I believe that we were always looking at a rebuild. The losing skid expedited it by 1 or 2 seasons. Dorion had access to Capfriendly, so he must have known that with Melnyk's budget and limitation on things like signing bonuses and NMCs, that keeping the core we developed was not possible.
I think that is part of why he was so aggressive in acquiring what he perceived to be the upgrades the team needed to win. I also think it's part of why he so easily moved on from Zibanejad for a much older player. Because he perceived Brassard to be an upgrade in the short-term, and he knew that after Zibanejad's 3 years of team control were up, he would be gone anyways. So his potential would be irrelevant. At least, I hope that was his justification...
Unfortunately, all his big additions underwhelmed (Burrows, Brassard, Duchene), and the team was already not anywhere near being a contender, despite the run they made off the backs of Karlsson's play and the team buying into Boucher's ridiculous system.