When your list of "good trades" is paying full retail for 3 years of Hamilton, giving up a middle 6er for a different middle 6er, trading a cap dump/buyout candidate for a $3.4m backup goalie, and getting a 37 year old Brent Burns for essentially nothing, you'll have to excuse me for not being impressed. Even Trocheck and Skjei weren't exactly cheap, even if they both had term left on their contracts.
In fairness, at the time the deal for Trocheck was viewed as incredibly cheap.
- Haula was an unhappy UFA to be which Florida was only taking back as a cap hit and had no intent on re-signing.
- Wallmark was borderline NHLr that only played 11 games for Florida.
- Luostarinen was a former 2nd round pick that was coming off a 25 point in 44 game AHL season and had only 8 NHL games under his belt. He's developed nicely, but he wasn't deemed very valuable at the time of the trade.
- Priskie was AHL fodder who the Canes got for free as an NCAA free agent.
As far as Skjei goes, a late 1st isn't that much different than two seconds. Canes had the ability to make that move because they had two 1st round picks (because of the very good trade with Toronto to take on Marleau's cap hit for a 1st round pick) so they had the luxury of trading the later of the picks for Skjei, who has been outstanding in Carolina for 4+ seasons at a decent cap hit. Canes (management and fans) would make that again trade 10 times out of 10 and be very happy with it. Even some Canes fans who balked at it at the time have realized how good of a trade it was and how good Brady has been.
But, then again, I could be spoiled as an Avs fan, where a good trade is a couple of 2nds for a Devon Toews, who is then signed for 4 years at $4.1m.
Sure, but judging a GM off of one of the steals of a trade in the last few years is probably not a fair bar to judge them against.
Even so, I don't think Waddell was making those decisions on his own. The Canes run a GM by committee approach, so he shouldn't get too much credit, nor blame for each move because of that.
In the end, it's team results that matter. He's didn't win a cup or a conf. final, so it's fair to say he fell short there as a GM. But it's also fair to say that in the 6 season's he's been GM, the Canes have had the 3rd most points in the NHL, have made the playoffs 6 straight seasons, have won at least 1 round in each of those playoff seasons, and have made it to the ECF twice.
This was after inheriting a team that had gone 10 years without a playoff appearance.
