After being acquired for Egor Sokolov earlier this month, Janik is all that's left from the 2019 Mark Stone trade.
After being acquired for Egor Sokolov earlier this month, Janik is all that's left from the 2019 Mark Stone trade.
We've known for a long time that the Ottawa Senators were fleeced in the Mark Stone trade. It's news that's as old as it is painful.
What's relatively new is that every player they got in the original deal is gone. All of them. The club parted company with the final two pieces, Erik Brannstrom and Egor Sokolov, earlier this month.
To recap, the complete deal was Stone to Vegas for Brannstrom, Oscar Lindberg, and a 2020 second-round pick, which the Sens used to select Sokolov.
Here's the state of the Stone trade tree.
Branch 1 (Dead): New GM Steve Staios allowed Brannstrom, an arbitration-eligible RFA, to walk into unrestricted free agency, where he was scooped up by the Colorado Avalanche. For Ottawa, Brannstrom was the crown jewel in the deal, prompting GM Pierre Dorion to famously call it his proudest day as GM. Dorion later backed off that statement when it became clear that Brannstrom's junior hockey offensive prowess in Sweden wouldn't translate to the NHL.
Branch 2 (Dead): Lindberg may actually be the best player the Senators received in the deal. He played 20 games for Ottawa, scoring 8 points, then became a UFA and returned to Europe in 2019. Now 32 and back with his hometown team, Skelleftea AIK, Lindberg led them in scoring with 51 points in 50 games and helped them win the Swedish League title.
Branch 3 (Jan Jenik): Sokolov was an RFA this summer, and after playing most of the past four years in Belleville, he was traded earlier this month to Utah for forward Jan Jenik. The UHC signed Sokolov to a bare minimum one-year, two-way deal.
The Sens signed Janik to the same basic deal Sokolov got in Utah. Both players were fine junior scorers, and both have been good AHL scorers for the past four years. And while their NHL looks have been limited, Janik is a better skater and can play all three forward positions.
Plus, he has a big fan in GM Steve Staios. The last time Jenik played for Staios was in 2019-20 when he destroyed the OHL at a two-point-a-game clip for the Hamilton Bulldogs. Unfortunately, Jenik got hurt that winter at the World Juniors, suffering a season-ending knee injury.
“He’s the best player in the league in my opinion,” Staios told the Hamilton Spectator during an interview about the injury that year.
So Janik is the one seedling that grows from the stump of the fallen Mark Stone trade tree. He won't ever be able to redeem a brutal trade, of course. But with Staios in his corner, the tree might live on for a while yet.