I posted what I thought would be the Leafs equivalent of the trade in one of the old threads a few days (weeks?) back. If I recall, it ended up being Nash (remember that the equivalent would be making these deals a few weeks after the championship was won), Johansen, Wisniewski and a couple others from Columbus for guys like Frattin, Ashton and MacArthur, signing Parise and then getting Ryan Smyth and Devin Dubnyk from the Oilers for Kadri and Blacker. In the end, we pretty much had Rielly, Colborne, Percy and Ross left from our top-10, and since the Leafs depth is not quite as good as the Jays, it means their prospect pool would be much more depleted than the Jays.
One thing I noticed immediately was that the other teams would be absolute fools to do the trades, not necessarily because the players weren't perfect matches (which they obviously were not), but because the difference in value between the top line established players and the fringe prospect players are much greater in hockey.
Of course, the best players (Ovechkin/Crosby/Lundqvist vs Pujols/Cabrera/Verlander) are probably as different from the fringe players in both leagues, but if you think of that second tier in baseball, guys like who the Jays got (Josh Johnson, Jose Reyes, etc) and try and compare them to similar players (in status/reputation, obviously) from the NHL (Kesler, Ryan, Sharp, etc), you generally are going to say the NHL players are more likely to be untouchable and will cost you serious value in return, while the MLB players might be movable for decent prospects that could be good but aren't certain to be.
The fact is, in the NHL, it's really hard to turn second-tier, borderline prospects into established top-end players. In the MLB,
almost all trades are borderline prospects for established top-end players.
Of course, as mentioned quite early in this thread, the other obvious problem is the salary cap.
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