Quoting: jwg314
Swap Ceci with Broberg and it looks better for both of us I think. You could use Ceci rn whereas Blues would be better off with Broberg.
Personally, I disagree. If we're moving Parayko and Parayko only, Ceci has some value to us. His contract isn't great, he's probably an alright 4/5 D man, but it's not an awful contract.
Our issue currently is we have 6 LD who have played NHL minutes either signed through next season (Leddy, Krug, Scandella, Rosen) or RFA (Tucker, Perunovich). Which is somewhat problematic unless we can move out a guy on the Left side. Most preferably Krug. Short term the cap being even doesn't really matter at all. We aren't going to go out and sign someone next season that's going to instantly make us a competitive club. We have too many holes and too little cap space.
That being said, I still sway back and forth about whether trading Parayko is a good idea at all. He's by far and away our best defenseman. He plays ridiculously hard minutes and alot of them and still somehow comes out with around 30 points a season while starting in the d zone around 65-70% of his shifts. There is nobody in the league that is going to thrive in that role with Nick leddy or a revolving door of 4-7 d men which is what he's been asked to do. We cannot and will not replace him for years, probably unless we're terrible next season and have a high draft pick.
In regards to the proposed trade. My qualm with it is the pick is in 24 which isn't the worst thing in the world, but late 1sts in 24 are probably going to be monumentally worse than late 1sts in 23, and possibly even mid to early 2nds. Not a deal breaker and certainly value there, but trading a core piece, really the main piece of your defense for that, a stop gap, a cap dump and a prospect is extremely risky. It's a good way to get set back years. I'm not entirely familiar with Broberg's development path, but he has a good pedigree. He'd need to blossom into a reliable two way good 2nd pairing guy sooner rather than later for it to be worthwhile (I'd bet he will, but there's still a risk factor) that the Blues would have to assess.
There's no argument that the last two seasons of Parayko's contract could be bad. The good thing is his strength isn't physicality and he's not really a physical player. His strength is his skating and reach, skating is the area where it could really start to fall off in the 36-37 year old seasons for him.