Should the Red Wings Consider A Trade For Tyson Barrie?
By Nick Seguin
7 years agoThe first domino has fallen in the Red Wings trade deadline season. It’s clear the team is hungry for action on the trade market and one of their biggest needs is a top-2 defenseman. Kevin Shattenkirk may be the most desired asset on the market this year, but a trade for him would likely require giving up a first round pick, a prospect, and a low tier roster player. These are not assets the Red Wings are in a position to give up.
But there are other top-2 defensemen on the market. In Colorado, there is a fire sale happening. Joe Sakic is apparently willing to part with any of his players except for Nathan MacKinnon. Most of the rumours and analyses have been around forwards Gabriel Landeskog and Matt Duchene, but the Avalanche have some solid young defensemen on their roster too. Tyson Barrie is one of them.
Should the Red Wings consider a trade with their former rival?
As much as any dealings with the Colorado Avalanche make me sick, Barrie is a young, right-handed, offensive-minded defenseman. He’s been putting up 40-50 point seasons on a team that, for lack of a better word, has sucked. This season, he’s fourth on the team in points with 25, which is good enough for top-50 among league defensemen. He’d be second only to Mike Green on this year’s Red Wings blueline.
It’s worth noting that roughly one third of Barrie’s points come on the powerplay, which, as we all know, is a huge pain point for the Red Wings this year. Keeping this in mind, his all situations on-ice CF% of 52.71 ranks 55th among league defensemen, only a smidge behind Erik Karlsson who’s at 52.82. He’d be a great help for the Red Wings on the powerplay.
That being said, Barrie’s 5-on-5 CF% is only 46.25 and is middle-of-the-pack on the worst team in the NHL. This is pretty normal for him. He only records 0.4 hits per games played and one block per game played, which is dead last among team defensemen. He’s also only recorded 15 takeaways which doesn’t even crack the top 80 among league defensemen. This tells us that while Barrie may be offensively gifted, his contributions defensively are minimal.
This would be a problem for the Wings because they don’t have a shutdown defenseman good enough to pair with Barrie and cover for him when he rushes the puck. DeKeyser has shown huge signs of regression, Jensen and Sproul both have more offensive tendencies than defensive ones, and Mike Green fills the same role as Barrie would. Alexey Marchenko may have been a good partner for him, but that ship has sailed.
As far as trade pieces go, it was reported last week that the Wings would be willing to give up Andreas Athanasiou if there was a twenty-two year old top pairing defenseman coming back. Well, Barrie is twenty-five and it’s been rumoured that Sakic is looking for an NHL-worthy shut-down defenseman for the Avs so the two asks are pretty far apart. Still, I can’t imagine a one-for-one proposal is something Joe Sakic would say no to.
Before I go on, I just want this to be clear: I do not think the Red Wings should trade Andreas Athanasiou for Tyson Barrie.
Okay, now that that’s all cleared up, let’s talk about Barrie’s salary and whether or not the Red Wings could make it work. Currently, Barrie’s cap hit of $5.5 million is on the books until 2020-21, at which point he becomes an unrestricted free agent. It’s not weighed down with any no trade or no movement clauses, either. With Mike Green’s cap hit coming off the books after next season, the Red Wings could, in theory, make this work. But they probably shouldn’t. There are so many long-term contracts weighing down their salary cap that the team should be looking to free up space, not bog it down further for another three years.
Ultimately, I don’t think the Red Wings should make a trade for Tyson Barrie. While nobody in the organization will use the word “rebuild”, that’s exactly the territory this team should be playing in. Their mindset should be that of shedding long-term contracts and acquiring assets. They don’t need to be acquiring a defenseman like Barrie, even if his value is low right now due to his down year.
If the Wings can tank hard enough this season, there is a young guy by the name of Timothy Liljegren they should have their eye on. He’s a right-handed, offensively gifted defenseman who will probably turn out better than Barrie is anyways. Liljegren was ranked 3rd on TSN’s mid-season draft rankings and is expected to go somewhere in the top-5. Selling their pending UFAs at the deadline and continuing their 2016-17 freefall could land them as far up as top-5 in the draft. It would be their highest draft pick in fifteen years and I truly hope it comes to be.
#DontWinForLiljegren
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