New York Rangers: The Vancouver rumors and the mystery box

According to multiple sources, the Vancouver Canucks are trying to move up into the top two of the draft to pair the team’s first-round pick from last year’s draft, Quinn Hughes, with his younger brother Jack. The Rangers shouldn’t even think about it.

Typically, I believe that a team should always be willing to listen to trade offers on any player or asset. After all, Wayne Gretzky was traded multiple times during the course of his career and if the great one could be dealt, anyone could. But, this brings us to the New York Rangers and the second overall pick in this year’s entry draft.

There’s an episode of Family Guy in which the main character of the show, Peter Griffin goes to a timeshare presentation with the intention of getting a gift. The presenter promised that anyone who attended the presentation and sat through the entire thing would get a free boat. But, in the end, the salesman pulls out a mystery box and forces Peter to choose.

Peter’s rationale for picking the mystery box is “there could be anything in the mystery box, even a boat.”

Inside the box were two tickets to a comedy show. When Peter returned home, everyone else on the block was talking about their boat and how excited they were.

The point is, general manager Jeff Gorton should not try and get too cute with the second overall pick. The NHL draft isn’t like the NFL draft in which players can immediately slide into the lineup upon being drafted so getting four draft picks in exchange for one doesn’t have as much immediate value.

If either the Rangers or the New Jersey Devils were to take a bounty of assets from the Canucks for the first or second overall pick, it’d be the equivalent of taking the mystery box instead of the boat. Both New York and New Jersey are starved of high-end talent and in dire need of impact, players to compliment their respective talent.

The hypothetical

The only scenario in which this deal would make some sense is if either the Rangers or Devils would get Elias Pettersson in return as part of the package. The young Swede had an outstanding rookie season and recorded 66 points as a 20-year-old. However, it wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense from the Canucks’ perspective to move its best forward to acquire another.

That’s where we enter mystery box territory. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see where this could go terribly wrong for either the Rangers or Devils. In theory, four or five draft picks in exchange for one seems like a good idea.

Yet in practice, if a team is passing on the chance to select either Jack Hughes or Kappo Kakko in exchange for draft picks, what is it hoping will come from those picks?

Why would a team pass up the chance at an impact player right away in hopes of turning one of four picks into a talent of a comparable ability?

This is a slam dunk no brainer decision, whichever of Hughes or Kakko the Devils don’t take, Gorton can run to the podium and take. This Canucks’ rumor is a byproduct of the madness of the offseason for certain teams.