Chicago Blackhawks: Three trade packages for Erik Gustafsson

Trade 3

The best story in the entire National Hockey League is that of the Columbus Blue Jackets. After losing Artemi Panarin, Ryan Dzingel, Matt Duchene, and Sergei Bobrovsky to free agency, everyone believed that they would be one of the worst teams in the NHL. It would have been easy to lose that many great players and just mail in the season and try to improve for the future.

Instead, John Tortorella is now the frontrunner for the Jack Adams Award as the NHL’s coach of the year. He has this team work hard every single day to get where they are right now. That is on the playoff bubble of the Eastern Conference wild card. One thing that might put them over the edge improving their power play. They are one of those teams tied with Nashville for 23rd in the league at 16.4%. Adding an offensive player to that group like Gustaffson might do that for them.

They are also dealing with a lot of injuries, including their stud number one defenseman Seth Jones. Some of those absences might make inserting Gustafsson easy as they try to get into the playoffs. He would fit in there nicely if he can find some of that offense on a team that is still in the race.

Columbus doesn’t have every pick available to them right now but they might be willing to move a fourth in 2020 and a third in 2021 for Gustaffson if they see making the playoffs as something that is important this year. If they don’t deem making the playoffs as necessary as much as developing some talent then they might not do it, but if they are into making a push then this would be a strong trade for both teams.