yeah, Price isnt netting you Francouz alone let alone all that other stuff.
There isnt anything realistic the habs could give up to get girard

I personally disagree: I think we as fans (especially on CapFriendly) really put a lot of weight into Price's cap hit when we evaluate trades that feature him. In any retention scenario, Price really gains value exponentially. We all agree he is the best goaltender in the world. Most of us agree that he puts less emphasis on the regular season: I suspect this a combination of the Baha miles the Habs put on him early in his career and their overall lack of success.

I would concede that any Price trade needs to be done so at 50% retention and I think the combination of Francouz+Girard is fair so long as either no pick is exchanged or there's like a late pick going back to Colorado. Francouz doesn't hold a lot of inherent value. The trade really comes down to how fair you think Girard for a 50% Price would be, and I do personally think that tips in the Avalanche's favour, but not by as much as the original poster has here.

As an Oilers fan, I'd really, really, really prefer to do Lavoie and a 2nd for a retained Chiarot. I'd actually be much more in favour of doing a 1st straight-up before moving Samorukov.

well, cap hit is a massive massive thing with the cap. And when the goalie is old and hasnt been very good most of the past 3 years, and hasnt played all season and his cap hit is crazy huge and goes on for 4.75 more seasons .
And no, we certainly do not agree that price is the best goalie in the world. Just because he had a really good playoffs doesnt excuse that he has been pedestrian at best in the past 3 regular seasons. the best goalie in the league won the cup last year, and the year before, and the 2nd best is in winnipeg and price isnt even 3rd after them.
Price at 50% gets you nothing from a team like Colorado, and it especially does not get you girard. If Montreal wants Girard they are gonna have to start with Suzuki or Caufield+++.
Price is a cap dump unless you can find a really dumb GM like Ken Holland to pilfer.

Girard is a second-pairing defender: to insinuate that he's worth Caufield, Suzuki, or a combination of those two and any other surplus is simply ridiculous and I don't even have a horse in that race. You aren't operating in reality if you only want to approach this conversation exclusively from the point of your anti-Price bias.

In a Space Jam-esque scenario where ailens want to play hockey for the fate of the Earth, Price would be the man they put in net. Vasilevskiy would be the backup. Hellebuyck might get an invite to be the third string, and that would be depend entirely on how hot names like Gibson and Lehner were at the time. This is merely objective fact. A sweeping majority of NHL players, executives, and even fans, recognize that Price is the standard.

Getting that calibre of goaltender at essentially market UFA rate for starting goaltenders that aren't anywhere near as good as the names thrown around in this discussion holds extravagant value. I really don't know what to tell you here. Francouz and Girard for a half-retained Price is a pretty fair deal all things considered and it immediately vaults the Avalanche into their own contending status ahead of all other clubs.

This is a crazy. Price has a massive cap hit and if he was so valuable Seattle would have just taken him for free, they literally had a full 81.5M in cap space take him on. On top of that he hasn’t played a game this year and is in the player assist program. That means you literally have to pay someone to take him. On no planet does COL give MTL a 23yr old top pairing quality dman locked up for half a decade on a team friendly deal for anything less than Suzuki. MTL fans are doubly delusional if they were the ones trading an asset like Girard they would be making ACGM’s where they get the equivalent of 4 1st td picks. Why does everybody but MTL fans get that? Seth Jones who isn’t as good as Girard and at almost double the cap hit netted 2 1st td picks a 2nd and a top dman prospect.

Girard is a top pairing dman on half the teams in the NHL. He eats 20+ minutes a game, scores 30+ pts with no PP1 time, has great shot share metrics, and is a good defender in that he uses his skating and stick work. He gets crapped on because he isn’t 6+ ft tall.

If you're using TOI as a blanket metric as where a defenceman should play up and down the lineup (which I for the most part agree with) then exclusively among LHD, Girard is 37th in the metric. It's not hard then to follow the logic that if there are 32 teams in the league thus 32 top-pairing LHD, Girard is more appropriately in that transitory zone of "good top-4, poor man's top-2". Expanding that search to disregard handedness should produce 64 top-pairing defencemen and Girard once again falls a hair short at 70th.

His counting numbers definitely fit that bill however. Girard is one of the more reliably productive defenders in the league.

He's an excellent top-four name, one that I quite like to be honest, but I think it's yet a stretch to label him a bonafide top-pairing defenceman. If you subscribe at all to age curves, he still has a couple years to reach that echelon but otherwise is going to make a career out of being one of the better second-pairing defenders in the league. Perhaps he doesn't adjust fully to a proper top-pairing role? Perhaps he does.

To fully conform to your statement, I think Girard would be a top-pairing defenceman on maybe 10 teams in the league. 12 if we ignore handedness.

Avs don’t want price, they aren’t trading girard can we knock it off with these awful trades already

Price at 50% retained he isnt worth his contract, his numbers over the past 4 years have been a below average starter, at 5m aav yo wouldn't be paying that for a bottom of the league starter....and no a hot streak in the playoffs capped off with an awful finals does not undo what he has been for the last 4 years.

Except he plays both sides and because the Avs defensive core is so strong he doesn’t play PP1 or PK1 and his minutes get paired some. Off the top of my head because of his ability to move the puck, play both sides, be solid defensively and to run a PP (let’s face on the PP the Avs have the elite of the elite in Makar and Byram is insanely good if he could stay healthy for ffs) he’s top pairing on most teams with obvious exceptions like COL, TBL, VGK and some others. My contention is and has always been a top pairing caliber dman that’s 23 locked up long term is a puck mover and contributes points is outside of a 1C one of the most valuable assets. It gets old making the comparison but he is better than Jones at half the price, and he is locked in at that price all through his prime years. The Avs aren’t trading him, but if they were to it would take a pretty penny to pry him away and the proposed trade by the op is ridiculous.

He isn't. Price has been one of my favorite players for years now and I like him a lot, especially off the ice. But he isn't the best goalie in the world right now and he hasn't been that for a few seasons. I hope he gets back to his former self (2013-2017 Price), but right now he is not the best Goalie in the world and it's not particularly close. He is the active goalie with the best career though.