Fair enough, but I think JT is young and good enough that its worth the risk especially in 2021 draft that many think is the worst draft in recent memory. I still think the pick won't be a lottery pick and very few late 1sts will be as good as JT. As much fans lets hope that for once we get the best of a deal.
To answer the title to the thread, we have a good player in J.T. Miller, but the trade to acquire him is a bad trade for the Canucks and that doesn’t depend on whether the Lightning get a lottery pick out of it. It’s just bad planning unless the Canucks trade Miller before his contract expires and get back, as a minimum, approximately what they paid for him.
It doesn't matter if Miller's market value was a 1st round pick and a 3rd pick. That value should have been set by a team which was closer to contending for a championship than the Canucks were.
The Canucks should not have been the team setting the market value for Miller. It's like asking an old man who can't see well enough to drive to pay $28,000 for a new car that is worth $30,000 new. Even paying less than market value for a new car that car isn't worth $28,000 to him unless he can sell it for that amount.
A few things to note:
1. The pick that the Lightning get may or may not be a lottery pick, but though it is still early it appears quite likely that the Canucks will do better with him than they would have done without him. If the Canucks make the playoffs this season and give the Lightning the 16th overall pick, that doesn’t mean the Canucks lost out on the 16th overall pick. The Canucks will have lost out on the lottery pick they would have had if they had not acquired Miller. That might have been a high pick.
In fact, given that in the past six seasons they’ve finished 6th last, 23rd last, 3rd last, 2nd last, 6th last and 9th last, respectively, recent history suggests the likelihood of a high pick would have been pretty high.
2. The Canucks also gave up a 3rd round pick.
3. As people love to point out, draft picks don’t usually work out-though high first round picks turn out to be NHL players most of the time they aren't certainties and the chances drop as the picks get lower.
Otoh, the draft is a teams chance to acquire cheap, cost-controlled players, to get players they have the option of keeping for most of a decade without another team having the right to take him away, the chance to build loyalty so a player may want to stay with the team and in particular the chance to get at least a portion of the players’ best years without paying him his full value.
That is a considerably amount to give up. Let’s look at it this way.
This season Quinn Hughes will make make between $925,000 and $1,775,000. It doesn’t matter whether he wins the Calder, becomes an all-star or breaks long-standing NHL records, he won’t make as much as Jordie Benn.
That will also be the case next season. It would have been the case the following season, as well, if the Canucks hadn’t chosen to burn a year off his entry level contract. (Surely there’s nobody crazy enough to think that Hughes would have chosen to forego three years of income, some of which he’d never get back, by staying in school until 2022.)
So say the choice is a chance at the next Quinn Hughes, or, to look at the 2015 draft, McDavid, Eichel, Marner, Hanifan, Provorov, Werenski, Rantanen, Barzal, Connor or Chabot, with three potential years of high level play at entry-level pay followed by several more years where you have the right to keep the player, or four years of J.T. Miller @ $5.25 million per season.
Trading the picks hurts the future as you have the right to keep the young players you pick until they’re 27 years old or 7 year veterans (and may keep them longer-look for example at the Sedins.)
It hurts against the cap. You are getting young players cheaply, even if they are really good. Cap space matters-it is the ability to pay your own players enough to keep them, and the ability to sign the missing pieces to make your team a really good team as well as, in some cases, the ability to make trades to acquire players other teams can’t afford to keep.
Against what the Canucks gave up for the future in trading for Miller, both asset-wise and cap-wise, the Canucks have a better chance to make the playoffs.
Starting with a bad team if this is how you build your team you might, if the players you acquire are good enough, get to be a pretty good team, though starting with a lot of cap deadwood and a poor roster makes that unlikely. It is far more likely that you’ll rise a little in the standings, maybe make the playoffs once or twice but by the time Miller is done, it will be hard for for the Canucks to be much more than a marginal playoff team. For that rise from mediocre to potentially decent, maybe getting into the playoffs, imo it isn’t worth the risk of making the future worse, potentially contributing in a negative way to the Canucks being mediocre for years to come.