It was trade-deadline 2013 and the Capitals were desperate.
So desperate to add to their team, they traded Martin Erat for Filip Forsberg, their recent (at the time) #11 overall pick and top prospect.
Now, in retrospect, it's obviously a bad trade.
But what really burns, is that it was a bad trade at the time.
When the trade went down, Martin Erat was a 48% player with 3 5v5 goals on the season. The year before that, he had ten, the year before that, eight.
He was 31 years-old and in obvious decline.
The Capitals traded for him as if they had never seen him play, read a scouting report about him or even bothered to look up some stats.
Once they got him, he was total crap. He played over 60 games for the Capitals, plus a few playoff games, and he scored three goals for them.
To say that he sucked is polite.
To say that the trade was bad is to compliment it. It's a bad trade today no doubt, but it was almost just as bad then.
Forsberg of course, is going to the Stanley Cup. In an ironic twist to the unlucky Capitals, the prospect they traded to get them over the hump has now gone farther than the team he never got to play for.
91 goals later and it's pretty clear that Forsberg was the #1 overall pick in the 2012 draft.
After seeing the Caps go down, yet again, this trade hurts more than ever.
It's too bad NHL teams are so loathe to play young players. No matter how raw Forsberg was in 2013, he would have been better than Erat.
It's not fun, but it's hard not to imagine how good the Capitals would have been if they never made that trade. Perhaps they'd already have their Cup, who knows?
All we know is one thing: Somewhere out there is a guy who jumped the gun and bought a Martin Erat sweater (I know a guy who owns a Fredrick Sjostrom Leafs sweater, so this must be so) and I would really like to meet him.
Washington Capitals Blogger • 
Join the Discussion:
»