It's a shame Carolina didn't trade him for anything worthwhile.

watch for Kochetkov becoming elite

The contract was signed a year after this deal. CAR still traded away a 40 goal scoring rental for very cheap. BUF got great value in the trade, but its the contract they signed afterwards that was terrible

I thought it was a horrid trade for Sabres, since even a good Skinner wasn't going to get the Sabres in the playoffs. So, the Sabres gave up young assets and still finished out the playoffs. Then the Sabres compounded their mistake by resigning Skinner to overpaid 9m X 8 yr deal.

Bad trade for both teams.

Hmm 🧐

Well it was a good trade for both teams until Skinner signed that extension

Is the jury still out?

It’s entertaining reading the comments after all these years. My opinion of the trade has not changed. I thought it was stupid that a team whose biggest problem was scoring goals would trade their best goal scorer for what some people called magic beans (a good way to describe futures that may or may not amount to anything). I get that they were probably not going to re-sign Skinner, but for what they got for him, I thought they would have been better off keeping him as a 1-year rental, and trading him at the deadline if it looked like they were going to fall short of the playoffs again. They were making good progress on their rebuild and they had just drafted Svechnikov, so there was a lot of optimism around the team, but this trade killed it. It looked like they were giving up on trying to make the playoffs that season and taking a step back in the rebuild. (I might have felt differently if I had seen the comments from people who thought Pu was NHL-ready – I wasn’t on CapFriendly at the time – but it turned out that I was right to think that the value was in the draft picks.) They made the playoffs anyway, and went all the way to the conference final, but maybe they could have done even better with Skinner still in the lineup, or some other roster player they could have traded him for instead of the magic beans.

From Buffalo’s perspective, I thought it was strange that the worst team in the league would trade for a 1-year rental, but I think they were looking for a quick fix, and they could have flipped him at the deadline and probably got back at least as much as they paid for him. Instead, they signed him to a contract they’d quickly regret, but they didn’t have to do that, so that doesn’t make it a bad trade.

they turned Skinner into Kochetkov and Nikishin, hmmmmm

This will go down as one of the most interesting trades of all time
When it first happened it was undeniably an easy Sabres win. Skinner hitting 40 goals made Carolina look even dumber, but not as dumb as Buffalo did when they extended him for 8 years at 9 million. Already looking like one of the worst contracts when signed, it arguably became the worst contract in the leauge during the first 2 years of his contract when he would only score 21 goals in 160 games. Luckily he has rebounded with back to back 30 goal seasons and 20+ this year too
Despite the canes getting shafted in terms of value in the trade at the time, what those picks became makes this a canes win. Getting their future starter in kotchetkov and one of the best defense prospects in Nikishin is something not even canes fans thought could happen
This raises the question: Carolina should of easily gotten more than 2 picks for a 30 goal scorer at the time, Skinner scoring 40 in his first year with Buffalo reinforced this. His 9 million dollar contract and the first 2 years were a different tier of horrible, yet Carolina ended up drafting amazingly with those picks, while no guarantees Buffalo would pick those 2 or that even Nikishin has a NHL career, Carolina came out like bandits