Describe the players the Leafs traded for in five words or less.

Answer: only one is needed. Brandon Carlo is good and Scott Laughton is bad.

Bonus answer: Brayden Schenn is also bad and is the bullet dodged.

Even allowing for the fact that the good/bad binary beloved of all arguers is not really sufficient for player evaluation, this is a little weird.

Carlo and Laughton have both declined in very similar ways. Carlo is a defensive defenceman, so no one is going to blame him for lower points totals, but he hasn't actually been a stellar defender in the last two seasons on the Bruins.

Laughton is a depth centre, not a top-six guy, and no one should really be looking at his points either, but he's a forward, so he'll wear it. But both are actually on pace for completely normal values for their careers.

But Laughton is bad and Carlo is good.

Carlo has the second worst to worst on-ice Corsi or Expected Goals percentage of all Boston defenders – two years running. He's a 45% man these days.

Laughton is more complex. He was pretty clearly the worst player on the Flyers last season, and this year he's a 45 pecenter in Corsi, but he's got very good on-ice Expected Goals numbers – both for and against.

But Laughton is bad and Carlo is good.

In the past, Carlo has been a legitimate top pairing or second pairing defender, so his decline is extreme this season and last.

Laughton has been around the third-liner level generally, and his results this season judged by GAR (so goal for and against are included giving this a picture of what's happened) are right in that range.

But...

Carlo's isolated impacts are complex. He's declined in effectiveness defensively, but he's still a net positive. His offensive impact has always been negative, and it's very poor lately, so poor it's erasing his defensive value. He's still fine on the PK.

Laughton's are more directly poor in all areas, but not awful. He's not a boat anchor, he's just not helping much. This is in contrast to his results, which are better.

We're not doing the bad/good thing now by the way. A look at who they have each been impacting this year might be revealing:

Carlo: In general, Carlo played with poorer quality teammates (forwards and defence) and faced top line forwards slightly more than average. In the specific he played with Nikita Zadorov, Charlie Coyle, Elias Lindholm, Brad Marchand and then David Pastrnak. That's the Bruins' second line most of the time. But put a big red circle around Zadorov.

Laughton: In general, Laughton played with much poorer forwards, but an average run of defenders and his competition was fairly average as well. In the specific his most frequent linemates were: Travis Sanheim, Garnet Hathaway, Rasmus Ristolainen and Ryan Poehling. Those three forwards have combined for 18 goals and Laughton and Sanheim would contest for the best player in the group and I think Laughton would win. Put a big red circle around everyone.

Carlo is 28 and Laughton is about to be 31, and both players have been in milieus where the opportunity to have a positive impact is severely limited. Both have been tasked with playing competition better than their linemates, and they've both failed in some pretty meaningful ways.

Neither player has been terrible this year. Neither has been very good. It's obvious that Carlo is a better player than Laughton if a one-to-one player comparison can be anything but absurd. Is Carlo a better first pairing defender than Laughton is a third/fourth line centre? I'm not sure how you answer that.

A player like Carlo is always going to matter more than Laughton would, just on ice time. But maybe toss away the good/bad and recognize that neither one of these players is riding high. If you lock down your opinion now, you'll spend the next couple of years finding evidence to support it.

The real risk here is that the mitigating circumstances aren't the whole story, and that it's just a narrative to paper over legitimately poor quality play. For me, Carlo is the much bigger risk, even though he's younger and his history is much brighter. He's going to be asked to do a lot more than Laughton is.

We'll see where this goes. Because the trade isn't the end of the story where you draw your conclusions, it's the beginning, where you need to embrace not knowing everything.

Oh, and the bullet dodged – Schenn who is also bad. Let's have another look in the summer when the Leafs, as they surely will, revisit this trade idea.

Analysis