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The Kyle Quincey Trade: Looking back at how the Wings earned 2nd place in a three-team trade

Today is the four-year anniversary of a trade which would shake the very foundation of the NHL itself.

Ok, maybe not Earth-shattering, but it’s the last time Ken Holland parted with a first round pick for a roster player and perhaps the most-aggressive trade he’s made in the entire cap era. In the spirit of fair play, our reaction to the trade at the time was very positive. The outcome of the trade has been a bit of a mixed bag. It’s hard to say Detroit really “lost” that trade with Tampa Bay, who used Detroit’s first round pick that year to take Andrei Vasilevskiy, but I don’t think you can call them the winners either.

In the time since the trade, Quincey has played 209 games and put up 37 points. This is juuuust a little lower than the 91 he put up in 226 games outside of Detroit with both Los Angeles and Colorado. The at-the-time-pending-RFA has since signed two contracts with the Wings and is now known more as a defensive-type defenseman.

Vasilevskiy has played 31 games and has a .914 save percentage and isn’t as good as Petr Mrazek. That kind of doesn’t matter anyway because the Wings wouldn’t have taken a goalie with that pick, but looking at the rest of the 2012 draft, the chances that they’d have ended up with an impact player at that pick are pretty slim.

But you know who definitely DID lose the trade? The Colorado Avalanche.

Here’s what the three teams have left from that deal:

Tampa Bay – Andrei Vasilevskiy
Detroit – Kyle Quincey
Colorado – Boston’s 6th round pick in 2016

That’s it. The Avalanche used a piece that was deemed to be worth a first round pick in 2012 to leave themselves with a sixth-rounder four years later. Here’s how it went down.

  • Steve Downie played 33 games for the Avs and scored three goals. Then he got run out of town because he took a bunch of stupid penalties and because it was believed he was a jerkoff to Gabriel Landeskog and nobody liked him.
  • Downie was traded in Oct. 2013 for Max Talbot, which raised a lot of eyebrows for how terrible a trade it was. Talbot got good usage on a bad team and ended up putting in just 12 goals in 133 games for the Avs.
  • In March of 2015, Talbot and Paul Carey were flipped to Boston in return for Jordan Caron and that 6th round pick. Caron gave the Avs 19 games and zero points before he wasn’t even tendered an RFA qualifying offer and was allowed to walk unrestricted.

So there you have it, the Avs traded a defenseman to get grittier and ended up with three more goals scored by forwards who got to be on a line with Matt Duchene than the turned-stay-at-home defenseman they dumped and now all they have to show for it is a shitty lottery ticket in this year’s draft. Happy anniversary, Avs!

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