Quoting: BoomerTheHero
If the wild are trading Rossi it means they dont see him as being their 2C of the future, and instead want to leverage him to a team for an upgrade. If they are trading Rossi for KJ, then they see KJ as an upgrade. If the wild thought he was a good 2C going forward, they wouldnt trade him because thats a high value position that isnt easy to find.
Not quite.
Quoting: BoomerTheHero
If the wild are trading Rossi it means they dont see him as being their 2C of the future,
This is correct with an emphasis on
their 2C of the future
Quoting: BoomerTheHero
and instead want to leverage him to a team for an upgrade.
Maybe an upgrade, but all reports so far (from Michael Russo) state that isn't necessarily an upgrade they're looking for, it's a different fit/play style. Knies is a good example of something that would work, because despite not having the same ceiling offensively, he's bigger and plays a more physical game. He's similar in value for those reasons, but he's not an upgrade on the player.
Quoting: BoomerTheHero
If they are trading Rossi for KJ, then they see KJ as an upgrade.
Again, not necessarily true. He might be a better fit for the Wild if they're trading for him, but that doesn't mean he's an upgrade. They might even see him as a downgrade in some ways (defensively, lacks the physical component, is a winger vs center), but like his offensive upside a little more than Rossi's. But for the same reason Knies isn't necessarily a downgrade despite the offensive upside being lower, Johnson isn't necessarily an upgrade, despite the offensive upside being higher.
For whatever it's worth, given Guerin's proclivities, I don't see Kent Johnson on his list of targets at all.
Quoting: BoomerTheHero
If the wild thought he was a good 2C going forward, they wouldnt trade him because thats a high value position that isnt easy to find.
Again, there's way more nuance to this than you're picking up. It's not that they don't think he can be a good 2C going forward, it's that they're looking for a different type of piece going forward. The reason they don't necessarily see him as
their 2C of the future is because they see Yurov as the 1C of their future and Ek as the 2C. But that doesn't mean they don't see him as
a 2C in the future.
As an example to illustrate this, the Wild traded Fiala, not because they didn't think he was
a top 6/first line scoring winger, but because they wanted to leverage that value for a piece that they felt was a bigger need or a better fit movign forward (Faber). Fiala is still a top 6/first line scoring winger in that scenario, trading him doesn't make that not true.