Dylan Cozens : the Sabres wanted Cole Caufield or Juraj Slafkovský in return

Dose
Crédit:

Last Friday, on the trade deadline, the Senators made a big move by acquiring Dylan Cozens. The club paid a good price (Josh Norris and Jacob Bernard-Docker), but they got a good player.

Cozens has two goals and three points in three games with the Senators, after all… and the Senators have not lost since his arrival.

That being said, if Cozens arrived in Ottawa, we know that several people in Montreal were hoping to see him join the CH. In the context where Kirby Dach is injured (and his season was not obvious to begin with), Cozens would have been an excellent second center to help Nick Suzuki.

And according to Mathias Brunet, who discussed all this on the airwaves of BPM Sports, Kent Hughes did his homework in the case of Cozens. That said, the price to pay was… very high.

The journalist claims that it would have cost… Cole Caufield or Juraj Slafkovský. Nothing less.

We know that the Sabres did not want to hear about getting draft picks or prospects in return for Cozens. The club wanted established players (and that’s what they got in Norris and Bernard-Docker), and the CH would have had to pay a high price to get Cozens.

And that, even if he had been struggling a bit for two years in Buffalo.

For the CH, therefore, getting Cozens would have cost one of the members of their top line. It might have balanced the team’s top-6 more… but when we look at the CH’s performance since the return of the Confrontation of the 4 Nations, breaking up the only productive line on the team would have been very, very risky.

And above all, it would have probably not been well received in the city. We know that Caufield and Slafkovský are extremely appreciated in the city, after all.

This shows one thing, however: if the CH really wants to make a big move this summer and go get a second center, they will have to be prepared to pay a high price. It’s not going to happen with a B-level prospect and a sacred second-round pick: it’s going to cost a lot.

In a nutshell

– Stan Bowman is trying to avoid being subpoenaed to testify in court in the Kyle Beach case.

– I love it.

– Interesting.