11/5/21 | Elliotte Friedman said on the 32 Thoughts podcast of the Rangers and Eichel, “when they got Zibanejad done there was no way they were going to be able to do it without retention. I think the other thing too is that, I believe the Rangers felt that the only way he was going to end up there was if their package was monumentally better than everybody else’s. I don’t think they thought it was impossible, but I think it had to be…if the trade with Vegas was going to be ‘this,’ the trade with the Rangers had to be ‘this’ times a billion.”
11/4/21 | Jack Eichel is being traded to the Vegas Golden Knights.
The trade is expected to be (Dreger, Friedman):
- To Vegas: Jack Eichel, 2023 Third Round Pick
- To Buffalo: Alex Tuch, Peyton Krebs, 2022 1st Round Pick, 2022 Second Round Pick
Eichel had long been connected to the Rangers.
Krebs, 20, was the 17th pick in 2019 and had been rumored to be someone Vegas was unwilling to move.
Tuch, 25, was the 18th pick in 2014 and is in the third year of a seven-year deal that has a cap hit of $4.75 million. Tuch is from Syracuse and is currently out after undergoing shoulder surgery in July.
Adam Rotter: Ultimately Buffalo gets a decent return for Eichel, but not the high profile one they were looking for. There was a lot of pressure being put on Buffalo from Eichel’s agents and the league to make a deal, allow Eichel to get the surgery he wanted and avoid a potential grievance. They get a top prospect in Krebs, a first round pick this year and big and a big, fast winger in Tuch as the core parts of the deal. They got what was probably the best deal that was offered to them, but it doesn’t include the big name coming back that they reportedly sought from Anaheim (Trevor Zegras or Jamie Drysdale), LA (Quinton Byfield) or the Rangers (K’Andre Miller, Alexis Lafreniere or Kaapo Kakko).
Different people around the league will give very different views on the degree to which the Rangers were interested in Eichel over the last few years. Some believe that the Rangers were head over heels for Eichel, others say they were interested in Eichel, but only tentatively since they had Mika Zibanejad and others say that the connection between the Rangers and Eichel wasn’t really there and that the two were linked for so long because of the David Quinn connection, the Rangers being the Rangers and going after big name players and that they had all of these picks, prospects and young players that Buffalo would have wanted in return.
It’s difficult to come up with a Rangers comparison for the package that Vegas is sending for Eichel because the Sabres would never take that kind of package from the Rangers. The belief has always been that the Sabres wanted a “Rangers tax” of sorts to send Eichel downstate and that itself makes this a hard thing to compare.
The first and second-round picks can be comparable but then it gets hard. The Rangers don’t have an Alex Tuch, a mid-20s former first-round pick that is signed long-term. Players who may be close to that either have no-moves, Kreider – who is 30 and Jacob Trouba) or in the case of Ryan Strome, a pending UFA.
So without Tuch you need multiple versions of Krebs, which the Rangers have, but perception is also important here. Krebs was Vegas’ top young player/prospect. Whether he has as much potential or will be as good as any young Ranger doesn’t matter when viewed in the window of Buffalo getting Vegas’ best young player/prospect. The Rangers were not giving away their best young player/prospects as reports indicated that Kaapo Kakko, Alexis Lafreniere, K’Andre Miller, Braden Schenider, and Nils Lundkvist were walled off. Perception is important and unless Lafreniere and/or Miller/Schenider/Lundkvist were included it was going to look like the Sabres didn’t get as much value for Eichel as they could have. They got the best possible deal from Vegas and sent him out of the conference. Neither of those things would have happened with the Rangers.
Ultimately the Rangers made their decision to stay with Mika Zibanejad and move on whatever level of interest in Eichel they had. Eichel can get his surgery, go to Vegas and new rumors of him coming to the Rangers can start when he heads into the last year of this contract in 2025-26.