Matheson has been just a step or so below Erik Karlsson this season, so I’m inclined to agree with you, just based on the assent Pittsburgh paid for a fairly lateral move.

To be fair, Dubas inherited a Hextall mess. Just moving off the Granlund, Ruuta and Petry contracts was a massive W.

Hindsight is 20/20 but at the time of the trade I remember thinking that Hornqvist was done and Pittsburgh did well to dump the last 3 years of his contract. It wasn’t a purely cap-motivated move, because they actually got back more cap hit than they gave up, but Sceviour still had some positive value and was on a low-risk contract. I didn’t know much about Matheson and whether he was worth his remaining 6x$4.875M cap hit, but I knew that Pittsburgh needed to get younger, and Matheson had a lot more hockey left in him than Hornqvist. Pittsburgh chose to protect him in the expansion draft, so at that time they didn’t think his contract was a liability. That cemented my initial thought that this was probably a good trade for Pittsburgh.

Trading Matheson later for Petry and Poehling was a separate move that should be judged independently of this trade, so I won’t talk about that here.