Hockey Nonsense 201.04 – Trade Tree – Brent Burns

Previously on Hockey Nonsense…

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I mentioned trade trees on a previous post, and feel Brett Burns would be a good example to show both how to find the information for yourself as well as a good look into an often misunderstood and prematurely judged trade.

[Link to trade tree image](https://imgur.com/a/kvUIOd8)

First off, to begin figuring out what happened, go to the Wild page on Capfriendly. Click the Trade History button, then scroll down and keep loading more until you get back to 2011. At that point, you should see the trade involving Burns. From there, you can continue to track each asset through the trade history (or click into individual players to figure out more about what happened to them) and follow the entire path.

So often this trade gets judged off of the three assets he was traded for – Coyle, Setoguchi, and a 1st round pick used to grab a player who ended up never playing a single NHL game. At face value several years removed, it seems like the Wild gave up an elite offensive defenseman and have nothing to show for it as none of those players are still here or made a huge impact while they were.

However, if you take a look at the trade tree image linked above, you’ll see the full (at least up until today) ramifications of the Brent Burns trade that happened in 2011 are much larger than those initial three assets, and there is one very important green box towards the bottom. I would have liked to make the vertical space on the image meaningful in regards to the amount of time between the various events, but the 20+ years that this continues to play out makes that a bit more difficult to represent and we will instead have to harness the power of your imagination as you visualize the decades of hockey that this tree envelops.

Starting at the top, the Wild drafted a baby Brent Burns in 2003, picking him #23 overall. He immediately joined the Wild and played 36 games in 2003-04 before dropping back to the AHL (with the old Houston Aeros) for the entire 2004-05 season. In 2005-06 he was back with the Wild, and this time would stick on the Wild until the 2011 draft. This draft was actually held at the Xcel Center, and is also is where the Thrashers franchise officially announced it’s new name as the Winnipeg Jets. During the draft, the Wild and Sharks finalized their deal, sending Brent Burns to the Sharks in return for Charlie Coyle, Devin Setoguchi, and the Shark’s 1st round pick (#28), which they used to select Zach Phillips.

These three assets form the three main branches of the trade tree.

**Zach Phillips** never really panned out and was traded for Jared Knight, who also never really panned out and left in free agency in 2016. This ends the lineage for the original draft pick from the Burns trade.

**Devin Setoguchi** stuck with the team for a couple years before ultimately being traded in 2013 to Winnipeg for their 2014 2nd round pick. Then in 2014, the Wild then packaged that pick with Torrey Mitchell and the Wild’s 2016 2nd round pick in exchange for Matt Moulson and Cody McCormick, both of whom played the rest of the season for the Wild and then left in free agency at the end of that season after being knocked out of the second round of the playoffs by a hot Chicago team. Those two players leaving ended the lineage of the Setoguchi portion of the trade.

**Charlie Coyle** stuck with and became an important piece of the team for several years. He was a large, powerful center, but never seemed to quite get everything clicking at once. His contract was set to end in 2019, and he was traded to Boston just prior to the deadline for Ryan Donato and the Rangers’ 2019 4th round pick. The NYR pick was bundled with another MIN 3rd rounder and traded to Carolina at the 2019 draft for their 2nd round pick where the Wild chose goalie Hunter Jones. Hunter looked pretty decent at first, but has never been able to perform and has been bounced between the AHL and ECHL. His contract ends this year as a UFA and I would imagine that will be the end of his NHL contracts. Ryan Donato, a dangerous shooting winger without much other depth to his game, played with the team for a little over a season before being shipped off to San Jose in 2020 for a 2021 3rd round pick originally owned by Pittsburgh. That pick was packaged with a Wild 1st rounder at the 2021 draft and used to obtain Edmonton’s first round pick for that draft (#20 overall). Up until this point, the trade tree has been a fairly sad mural of the last 20 years of the Wild franchise. However, that Edmonton draft pick was used to select none other than Jesper Wallstedt – hopefully the goalie of the future and potentially the future generator of a whole new offshoot of this trade tree.

So… 20 years after it all began with drafting Brent Burns, we are on the last few branches of this tree, and I think if you look at this trade at any time prior to the 2021 draft, this looks like a series of unfortunate events. However, Wallstedt has the potential to turn the entire story around and the Wild may find that they have ultimately sold one elite level talent for another that just took over a decade to get here. Time will tell if this is the case or not.

A lot of detractors of this trade question why the Wild traded Burns in the first place. There were probably a lot of reasons for this, but there are a few likely key issues. Brent was on a $3.35m/yr contract with the Wild at the time, but shot up to $5.76m/yr with the Sharks. He was still young and definitely was not the force on the ice that he would become over the next several years (Look at his stats on the Wild compared to 2-3 years later on the Sharks), and it may be that the Wild did not see him being able to live up to whatever contract his agent was asking for or didn’t expect to have the cap available for it. He also is at his core an offensive defenseman and has generally been pretty lax on the second half of that description. The Wild have never really embraced the idea of true offensive defensemen, and did even less at that time than they do now. Brent had several concussions during his time with the Wild as well as a shoulder surgery, eventually leading to him missing 29 games in the 2009-2010 season due to a concussion. During one of his absences due to a concussion, he hinted at another health related issue that had extended the recovery. To my knowledge the details of what exactly that was never came out, although his comments made it sound like his doctors and likely the Wild knew about it. Keep in mind that the Burns trade happened just a couple months after the death of Derek Boogaard rocked the hockey world. Finally, this trade happened shortly before the massive Parise/Suter contracts, and the team may have had some inkling that they were going to try to pull that off and knew they couldn’t keep him and get both of them. I’m sure portions of these issues plus others that are not public probably all factored into the trade.

It always amuses me when I see sportswriters judging trades with definitive grades hours after they are announced. An unforeseen serious injury that sidelines a promising career, an unexpected bust or star player, or even something like every branch of this trade looking so disappointing for years and then suddenly becoming Wallstedt can happen years down the road.

I think that by using the information in the rest of this series, you should be able to find this type of information on your own. If that’s not your thing, that’s fine. I’ll continue to write these and maybe you’ll find them entertaining in their own way.