WWYDW: President Wario

Since college is finally, mercifully over, I’ll be taking the reins back from J.D. Burke as the curator of What Would You Do Wednesday. Before we get into it, I’d like to extend a sincere thank-you to him for taking it off my hands for the school year.

With the Stanley Cup Final nearing it’s end, attention will turn to something that until recently tradition for just about every championship-winning American pro sports team: the annual White House visit. The invitation extended to the Philadelphia Eagles was recently rescinded amid suggestions that many Eagles players would choose to skip the visit, and LeBron James made waves yesterday when he said both teams in the NBA final would likely skip the visit. Hockey is a little different, to say the least. But goings-on in the Oval Office of late have been a touch controversial as of late, to say the least. If you were a player on the Stanley Cup-winning team, would you attend the White House visit? Why or why not? Should these semi-traditional visits just be scrapped altogether?

Last week J.D. asked: what would you do about the Noah Hanifin speculation? Would you make a trade for the 21-year-old defenceman, and if so, what would it look like?

Depends on the price, but I would pretty much move any piece outside of Pettersson/Boeser/Horvat/7th for Hanifin, and the 7th is negotiable.
If the 7th is involved, it depends on who is still on the board at 7. If by some miracle any of Wahlstrom, Hughes or Zadina fall out of the top 6, I would no longer be willing to move the 7th overall. Once those guys are off the board, I am open to the idea.
After watching Vegas, the idea of Hanifin and Juolevi running the Canuck’s transition game from separate pairings is appealing. At the same time, I think concerns over Hanifin’s offensive upside and defensive deficiencies are legitimate, so the price has to be right.

Canes are trading from a position of strength: They have an excess of Dmen, and Hanifin is expendable. Any trade Canucks do should be from the same position, and trading picks and prospects, especially for a rebuilding team, is IMO dumb. Not a knock on Hanifin. I’ll let the experts decide his worth. I want our prospects to be developed, and when we do that, and not before, and have a surplus somewhere, then do such trades. In other words, wait until you can do one of these Sergachev-Drouin or Jones-Johansen deals.

I’d be pretty okay with a top four of Juolevi, Hanifin, Dobson, and Stecher. That’s even letting Edler and Tanev ease their way down the depth chart as they age. It may not be the meanest blue line, but it’s reasonably big and mobile.

So long as you’re not trading Horvat, Boeser, Pettersson, Demko, I think you’re bringing in a “core” player and addressing some pretty major deficiencies. Even Benning is on the record, acknowledging that a winning group depends on not more than six or seven key guys. Right now, none of those key Canucks are D-men. By all means, try and hold onto 7, but there’s a very good chance that whoever goes at 7 never reaches Hanifin’s current ability. We can lust after potential and high ceilings, but I still tend to err on the side of caution and go with the known entity.

The Canucks could use Hanafin, but it’s not worth overpaying for him. The Canes have lacked a starting goalie for a decade. They’ve had several years where they’ve been a strong team and missed the playoffs due to Cam Ward and his .905 save percentage.

I’d offer Demko for Hanafin straight up, and then go fishing in the Leafs’ AHL team to pick up Garrett Sparks or Calvin Pickard on the cheap.

No trade, too expensive. Instead, I’d take advantage of the fact that this draft is deep in defencemen and spend the first 3 rounds hunting for the best defencemen available (who are likely to be BPA too). For example, if we got Noah Dobson, Calen Addison and Filip Johansson, we’d have 3 defencemen with decent to high offensive upside. Dobson and Johansson are of decent height so it’s not like we’re drafting Smurfs either.

The potential for some of the D available in the draft may exceed Hanifin’s ceiling. I say don’t make the trade, keep our picks and our prospects. Hughes, Dobson, Boquist, or Bouchard will be wearing a Canucks Jersey next year at training camp, and I am fine with that.