A look at how Tampa Bay Lightning trade of Mikhail Sergachev for Jonathan Drouin worked out

by Erik Erlendsson | @Erik_Erlendsson | Like us on Facebook
December 27, 2017

TAMPA – Mikhail Sergachev arrived in Tampa with few expectations this season, but certainly far exceeded them.

Jonathan Drouin arrived in Montreal with expectations higher than the roof at Bell Centre this season and has certainly underwhelmed.

On Thursday, the two players who were dealt in a one-for-one back in June, face off against each other for the first time when the Lightning host the Canadiens at Amalie Arena.

The spotlight will burn brightly on both players while the debate about who won the trade will flare up in circles among the fan base and media outlets for both teams.

So let’s take a look at where both players, and teams, sit six months after the trade.

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Drouin was the third overall pick in the 2013 NHL Entry Draft, selected behind Nathan MacKinnon (Colorado) and Aleksander Barkov (Florida). Tampa Bay opted to pass on defenseman Seth Jones to select Drouin for what looked on the surface as a marriage destined to last with the play-making winger with a special skill set joining a Lightning team with Marty St. Louis as a potential mentor and Steven Stamkos as a trigger man to finish off the plays Drouin could make.

But let’s just say the courting process did not go so well after the initial introduction.

Drouin did not come in and exactly light things up in his first training camp. Though he played preseason games with either Stamkos or St. Louis – sometimes both – Drouin was sent back to junior despite being named the CHL Player of the Year the previous season.

At the time, Lightning general manager Steve Yzerman said with the influx of rookies on the team – Tyler Johnson, Ondrej Palat and Richard Panik among them – they didn’t want to carry too many first-year players, which at the time included Brett Connolly.

It felt like from that moment on, the relationship between team and player was never the same, even as Drouin returned to Halifax and was a strong leader, getting the Mooseheads back to Game 7 of the QMJHL final a year after winning the Memorial Cup.

It was the next year when things started to go off the rails when Drouin was a healthy scratch on a handful of occasions and rarely in the playoffs as the Lightning advanced to the Stanley Cup Final for the second time in franchise history.

But it was the next year the divorce process began as Drouin was playing in a fourth-line role for most of the early parts of the season and his ice time was hovering around the 10-minute mark. By late December, he was sent to Syracuse in the American Hockey League to get playing time. A few days later a trade request made by Drouin’s camp was made public and a couple weeks later Drouin walked away from the Crunch, stating he would sit out while awaiting a trade, resulting in a suspension from the team.

Though he eventually returned to the organization after the trade deadline passed and he remained with Tampa, helping lead the Lightning to the Eastern Conference finals after a late-season call up and then reaching the 20-goal mark last season, his future with the Lightning seemed destined to come to an end as the relationship just felt like it was never going to last no matter how much counseling was involved.

”It’s really hard to break in and just start dominating, these (high drafted) players are not used to it,’’ Lightning head coach Jon Cooper said. “So there is some mental coaching that has to go in there, but the good ones always seem to rise to the top and that’s what I’ve said. (Nikita Kucherov) did it, Drouin did it and all these guys, it’s just that sometimes there can be some friction and it’s because you are trying to bring them along.

“No player wants to come in and hear they need to work on their defensive game, they all want to come in and say we are going to win 10-9 and in the end, that’s not how you win. In the end the players, they eventually buy in, it’s a question of whether they buy in in a month or three months or six months. They will end up making some mistakes, all those players they eventually bought in, it’s just they do it at different times.’’

That brings us to this past summer as the Lightning were looking at finding ways to get Tyler Johnson, Ondrej Palat and Drouin all signed to new contracts. At the end of the season, Yzerman said he believed he could get all three under contract for the season, though it would be a tight fit.

Instead, Drouin was seen as an asset that could potentially bring in a young defenseman, an area the team felt needed to be addressed as they had an excess of young forwards but no real blue line prospects.

”In the end, money comes in to play in this league,’’ Cooper said. “To sit here and think that we had any understanding the way the trade was going to turn out, the bottom line is Jo was the one that was going to bring the most value, he was the guy that was at the top of the charts. … In the end, it’s a business and we had to fill a need which we felt was on the back end, we did that and that’s it.’’

That will never be it, not as long as the two players remain in the league with their current teams. They will always be linked together, for better or worse.

While initial reaction to the trade was that Montreal got the better end of things, at least in the early going, as the more established player. Douin was the French-Canadien born star returning home to be the Francophone face of the franchise, a player with a unique set of skills to help bring life to the Montreal offense.

In the weeks after the trade, Drouin was out in the community, out in front of the cameras, reworking his image to try and separate himself from the teenager who requested a trade out of Tampa.

Sergachev, meanwhile, quickly adapted himself to his new surroundings, arriving in late June for the team’s development camp just a few short weeks after helping Windsor to a Memorial Cup Championship. Though he was asked to attend, he would have come regardless.

”It was good to meet everybody, the GM, the coaches and obviously the players,’’ Sergachev said. “Just get to know the organization and get to know everybody, that was huge. I wanted to come here, I was a prospect.’’

After the early introductions and getting through training camp, both players had opposite expectations – Drouin was supposed to fill a huge void in the Canadiens’ organization. Sergachev came in as a teenage defenseman with no guarantees of making the opening night roster or remaining with the team past the first month of the season.

Now two months in to the season, Drouin has struggled to live up the expectations placed on him as Montreal enters Thursday’s game 13th in the Eastern Conference standings, eight points out of the wild card spot and nine points behind the third spot in the Atlantic Division. In 32 games – Drouin missed five games due to injury – he sits fifth on Montreal in scoring with 18 points, is second with 13 assists and eighth on the team with five goals to go with a minus-15 rating, second worst on the team. An exceptional power play performer, he has just seven power play points, second on the team.

”I don’t think the product is finished with Jo, he’s still a young player and the trajectory is still going up,’’ Cooper said.

Sergachev, meanwhile, is in the Calder Trophy conversation as rookie of the year on the top team in hockey as the Lightning lead the league with 26 victories and 54 points, 18 points ahead of the Canadiens in the standings. Sergachev ranks seventh in overall rookie scoring with 23 points through 35 games, which leads all rookie defensemen despite averaging just 15 minutes, 10 seconds of ice time per game. (Boston’s Charlie McAvoy, second in rookie defenseman scoring, is averaging 23:10 per game).

Sergachev’s eight goals is second among all defensemen, behind only Zach Werenski in Columbus, while he’s tied for 13th among all blue liners in points with every player ahead of him on that list averaging more than 20 minutes per game.

”He’s been huge for us, obviously the way he’s contributed offensively,’’ Lightning defenseman Victor Hedman said. “He’s a great young kid that wants to learn and get better and prove himself in this league. He’s been phenomenal for us. He’s still 19-years-old, he’s still learning in this league and you can just look back at your own development and your own personal experience at that age and it’s going to be ups and downs. But he’s come to a great team, we’ve helped him grow in to the game but he’s proven himself all along that he can handle himself on the ice, contributed a lot offensively and made some great plays.’’

Needless to say, Sergachev is ahead of the curve, which means that conditional second-round draft pick that was part of the trade which was tied to the number of games Sergachev played – Tampa Bay won’t be seeing that pick as he’s five games away from reaching the 40-game threshold that will nullify that pick.

Sergachev is going nowhere anytime soon.

”He has an extremely high hockey IQ and he is the reason he has developed the way he has,’’ Cooper said of the young defenseman’s acclimation to the NHL this season. “The more we play him, the more comfortable he becomes and then it just becomes what situations can you put him in. No defenseman is without flaws, everybody makes mistakes in the game and you expect it more from young players just from their lack of experience in the league.

“But the more he plays, those mistakes are starting to dwindle but it’s all because of his hockey IQ, he’s a really smart player, especially in the offensive side of things. Hopefully this development continues because if it does he’s going to be a special one.’’

He’s already ahead of that curve, as well.

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