Does Brian Burke Regret The Phil Kessel Trade?
It's still a couple of months away, but this September represents the 10 year anniversary of the Phil Kessel trade to Toronto. A trade that changed everything and gave the Leafs a sniper who could score 30 goals year in and year out.However as expected the focus in hindsight has always been the three draft picks that the Leafs gave up, a first and second in 2010 and a first round pick in 2011. The Boston Bruins went on to select Tyler Seguin, Jared Knight and Dougie Hamilton with those picks. Seguin and Hamilton have both become talented everyday NHLers. The Athletic asked, 10 years later would then general manager Brian Burke still make that trade?"Yes. What I felt at the time was, we had price-point fatigue in Toronto. We had the highest ticket prices in the league, we weren't very good, and we didn't have any stars. And I don't think you can win without stars. I've had stars everywhere I've ever gone. What we didn't count on was the pick being that high. We talked about it. We said, «What if it's Taylor Hall? What if it's Tyler Seguin?» And we were like, «No.» We thought the best we would pick would be 10. We really believed our team was going to take a step. And that was the 18-wheeler year. That's where everything went wrong and we ended up giving them a much higher pick than we wanted to. In retrospect, I probably would have lottery-protected it. But teams weren't doing that back then, and I was confident in our group."
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