Is this serious? Lou traded Arnott for two players who were major contributors to yet another Stanley cup. Henrique was traded for a mid defender, on a team that was in a wildcard spot almost certainly for no other reason than they had one player having a non-replicable monster mvp level season. What did that trade get us? Ultimately nothing concrete in the long run.
Yes, it is serious.
We've got Nico Daws at the end of that trade tree. Is he any good? I don't know. Maybe. Certainly better than a 34 year old Henrique.
And you know darned well he was put on waivers in 21 not because he wasn’t performing. He’s been a consistent 0.5 ppg performer his entire career including that season. He’s contributed a similar point rate for Edmonton this playoffs. What the heck are you talking about?
What? Why else did they put him on waivers, because they like submitting forms to the league? Henrique was put on waivers because he had 3 years left on his long-term deal and he had 3 goals and 1 assist in his first 16 games. Anaheim was hoping that maybe somebody would bite and nobody did.
He would have survived the rebuild…only if by choice of the GM. Travis Zajac - a guy who put up similar numbers but was just better defensively - survived quite a few leans years before being traded at age 35. One year older than current Henrique.
Zajac survived because he had no trade value, he was on an albatross long-term contract. Henrique's contract was up at the end of 2019, when the Devils dealt Boyle and Lovejoy and Johansson and everyone else who was a UFA that year. They also ended up dealing Vatanen the next year.
You want to make the argument that we shouldn’t target him to return now, fine. I don’t know if I fully agree but you can make that argument. But the rest of that was BS.
It wasn't BS. It's fine to be upset as a fan that they didn't keep Henrique. To argue that it could be some sort of rational decision to keep a middling player through his UFA years on a team that underwent an entire overhaul - the only players left from when Henrique was last on the squad were rookies - makes no sense at all.
