Quoting: TN71
I like Cam Fowler, but I would NEVER give up that much for him. Brook is one of our best prospects, nominee for best DMAN in the WHL last year. Lehkonen still has potential to improve offensively and he is a great penalty killer and then add a first. I wouldn’t even give up Brook for Fowler, who only had 23 points last year.
What an incredibly short-sighted statement. Brooks is an impressive kid, but he's has 0 NHL games. The jump from WHL to AHL is steep, let alone from WHL to NHL. I mean, we have Sam Steel, who posted 50 goals and 131 pts in the WHL in 2017, won CHL top scorer, won WHL top scorer, was WHL player of the year and was a 1st team All-star. We think he'll turn out into a nice 2C. Meanwhile, your less impressive player, with weaker credentials, playing a position that is much harder to predict is going to surpass Fowler, an NHL level, top 4 D-man any day of the week with the ability to play as a complimentary top pairing D alongside a legit 1D. Yeah, good luck with that. Absolutely ridiculous, but just another classic case of potential >>>>>> actual player playing in the NHL.
The going rate for a player of Fowler's ability is replacement roster player + young, high potential prospect + 1st. We literally just traded Montour, a far lesser player than Fowler, for 2 of those things.
P.S. I don't care if you'd prefer to keep Brooks over trading him for Fowler. I think that would be the best thing for MTL, tbh. What irritates me is your suggestion that (a) Fowler is bad because he had 23 pts - the whole team sucked this year because of RC and pts isn't exactly a good metric to judge D-men, and (b) Brooks will probably end up better than Fowler - the high likelihood being he won't.