It's a fair point that the trade taken as a whole is what will be most relevant, and that we don't have a great read (only guess) of how Carolina and Pittsburgh may have valued the prospects involved in the deal, or Bunting, and how that impacted what various configurations of the trade would look like.
I just have to pushback on any implication that the difference between Pick 27 and Pick 44 is nuisance value. If a team was moving up 44 to 27 on draft day, they're going to have to offer something worthwhile. While all teams have different draft boards amongst their top 50 of course, they'd have to be pretty lucky if the guy they would have taken at 27 is available at 44 when there were 17 other opportunities for him to get selected... or very confident that their ranking is very "off-board" so to speak.
Recall that Carolina DID in fact trade the 27th pick that very draft, so we're not even speaking in hypothetical. They traded the 27th pick for the 34th pick and the 50th pick in the same draft to Chicago. Meaning, Chicago added the 50th pick in order to move up seven draft spots from the 34th to 27th. That 50th overall pick itself is much closer to the 44th pick being discussed here as the "evener" to speak, which is in turn further away from the 34th pick that was the one being traded up for.
This does suggest that a 17 pick difference between a late 1st and a mid-2nd does carry a good amount of difference in perceived value around the NHL.
" will bend themselves into a pretzel to try and justify the garbage.
