Letting Simek go while keeping a soon to be vastly overpaid Burns seems like such a Wilson thing to do

Doug Wilson doesn't choose who seattle takes...

Actually he really does, by protecting who you know they want and making outside deals to protect the players you can’t you can manipulate the situation where Seattle takes who we want them too. Or no one at all!

If we protected Simek and not Burns I'd be surprised if they took him without us paying them. Then we'd lose like Gambrell or someone irrelevant

That's a really hit or miss strategy (look at what happened to Florida), but it seems incredibly unlikely that Seattle will take Burns if he's exposed given his age and contract/production. Their best chance to keeping all four is exposing Burns and protecting Simek, rather than exposing Simek and protecting Burns.

The real solution is for Wilson to get in communication with Seattle, find out who they are willing to take vs who they are interested in and work deals for them to take a bad contract in return we give up a piece or two. This will also help us to see if we can trust them and work with them in the future or if they go on our no dealing list.

I think the only bad contract that could be exposed to them is Burns. Vlasic has a NMC, Karlsson (maybe bad maybe not) has a NMC, so if they want to waive for Seattle that's up to them. I can't see them taking Jones for any price considering the goalies that will be available. I don't see any other obviously bad contracts that I would pay to get Seattle to take. So I guess it comes down to do they want Burns and what are you going to give up for them to take him? If you're going to offer them Labanc or someone to offload Burns is that worth it rather than just losing Labanc naturally? (I get that Labanc will be protected, just using him as an example) Frees up a lot of cap space for San Jose, but there's not much to spend it on and Burns is still a productive player right now and what's left of the Sharks window is now. They might as well just keep him. They really should move him to RW.

Also- you can't trust any GMs. Their job is to rip you off if they can. You gotta trust your internal metrics in order to avoid that and do the ripping off.

You want to work with the league and the men in charge. You screw a few GM’s over and quickly the league won’t trust you or make deals with you. You job is to make logical fair trades Work with those in charge and do better than everyone in the draft.

That seems to be the prevailing theory doesn't it? I'm not sure it's actually backed up by reality. People didn't stop dealing with Armstrong after he stole O'Reilly. No one stopped trading with Bergevin after he offer sheeted Aho, which is like universally considered a "dirty move". The freaking Senators trading Karlsson to the Sharks like only two months after Wilson screwed over Dorion by flipping Hoffman for a profit to a team in the same conference. And no one stopped dealing with Sakic after he stuck a division rival with a player they eventually had to buyout, and got a top four defenseman and a top five pick for a player that didn't even want to play for them anymore.

The only reason people don't do it more is because it's hard to do, but the ones that are good at it seem to get away with it a lot. Obviously you don't actively try to screw everyone over and you don't be a dick about it, but if you can take advantage of another team's undervaluing, you do it. That alone clearly doesn't damage relationships that much.

You bring up a ton of legit references that make me 2nd guess myself.
Truth is think falls a little between both of us.
I think you have to be shrewd and cunning and see what the others don’t, I have a strong belief the Hoffman trade all 3 parties knew what was happening but the trade couldn’t be direct.
And I think a lot of teams stopped working with Bergevin for a bit because of that offer sheet, same with Wilson offer sheeting chigao’s hilimjarison so they had to bite and walk away from niemi and we picked Him up.
I think a lot of teams won’t work with Wilson because of dirty deals and because of that he’s had to fluff his offers a bit.

It’s my beliefs you don’t work with snakes even if they guard the riches you need to succeed cause you worry about the hustle so as a GM you have to play nice and bite only when it’s absolutly necessary.
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer!