Jacob Trouba trade puts Winnipeg Jets in a bad spot

The Winnipeg Jets had to trade Jacob Trouba. That was just a fact of life.

The Jets also knew that going into this past season’s trade deadline and had to acquire a player who might have made a meaningful difference for them. That was also a fact of life.

But with the collective return for Trouba and Brendan Lemieux now standing at “Neal Pionk and 26 games of Kevin Hayes,” it’s clear that Jeff Gorton may as well have just demanded Kevin Cheveldayoff’s wallet while he was at it.

There’s no downside here for the New York Rangers: They get that first-round pick back, they get a clear top-20 defenseman in the league who’s just 25 years old — as long as they don’t pair him with Marc Staal it’ll work out great — and a decent bottom-six NHLer who just turned 23. And as people now love to say, they “accelerate the rebuild.” All for the cost of a guy who doesn’t move the needle and someone they were going to lose to free agency anyway.

But this does put the Jets in a rather a bad spot. Their core is weirdly bifurcated; half of them are 31 or older (Wheeler, Byfuglien, Little) and the other half is under 26 (Hellebuyck, Scheifele, Connor, Ehlers, Laine). There’s very little in the middle there, and that’s fine, except you’re really rolling the dice on some of the older guys who propped up the organization for so long aging a little ungracefully.

There’s a cap crunch here, with Laine and Connor notably requiring new contracts, among others. Those won’t be cheap and they shouldn’t be; that’s the cost of drafting and developing players well. It’s one you live with.

But things are about to get really dicey. You can’t give up Trouba and get so little back for him without being worried about an already-leaky blue line. Check those Jets underlyings from last season and keep in mind that was WITH a high-end 5-on-5 player like Trouba. You can be as high on Pionk as you like — though, why would you be after even a cursory consideration of his quality? — but you have to recognize that regardless of what side of the ice he plays, he’s not a solution to anyone’s problems.

Hence the new rumors that the Jets tried to send Nikolaj Ehlers to Carolina for one of their right-shot D (Hamilton, Faulk, Pesce, and van Riemsdyk all fit the bill). It’s good that Cheveldayoff isn’t trying to do the Peter Chiarelli thing where he gets his ass handed to him in a trade and tried to convince everyone, including himself, that it’s all going to work out. The Winnipeg media isn’t as accommodating as Edmonton’s and wouldn’t help launder that position for him.

And granted, the Jets likely have scoring to spare — they put in 11 percent more goals than the league average last season, finishing seventh in offense — but getting rid of your fastest player by far, who scored at a 28-goal pace (in what was considered a down year) at 23 years old, to get Faulk or Hamilton? I’m not sure Carolina even seriously considers it.

But say that trade goes through. Doesn’t that put you right back into the same cap crunch, especially because their current nice-price contracts are up after 2020 and 2021, respectively? And that’s just to get them back to where they were on defense. Maybe. Not even improve.

That’s the kind of desperation you’d expect from a team that just had to give up a top-pair right D for nothing, I guess, but it doesn’t mean it’s not a bad move.

Of course, there’s also no real good move here, because circumstances forced Cheveldayoff to make a deal he never wanted to make. Maybe you can say Trouba should have been dealt a year ago, or at the last deadline, or at the upcoming deadline. But there’s never a good time to trade a player of that quality.

Who knows what the rest of the week holds, because lots of GMs seem to have multiple irons in the fire. That includes Cheveldayoff, by necessity. And he will likely have to be very creative.

He’s been known to pull off some great moves, but he would need some real magic — for instance, getting more than a 1-for-1 on one of his talented young forwards — to even come close to treading water this summer.

Ryan Lambert is a Yahoo! Sports hockey columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

All stats/salary info via Natural Stat Trick, Evolving Hockey, Hockey Reference, CapFriendly and Corsica unless noted.

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