Quote:
Originally Posted by sprague
So....
Tim Horton, Todd Sloan and Turk Broda
for Paul Ronty
Quality trading there. Amazed the Leafs didn't throw in the future rights for Mahovlich, Sittler, Salming and Keon too.
Frightening trade AI logic.
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Here's how the AI is looking at it:
Broda, at that point, is 34 and past his prime. Part of that is my fault, I've got him set to start declining after he comes back from the war in 1945, and he actually had some solid years left in him at that point. I'll move that back to 1950, the year he lost his full-time job, so he'll hold his value a while longer in the early part of a game starting in 1947.
Horton is 18, in real life he was coming off his rookie year at St. Mike's. He's just a prospect at that point; the AI can see he's got a lot of potential, but doesn't understand that he's a sure thing to reach that potential.
Same with Sloan to a lesser degree. He was in the AHL at that point, but still a couple of years away from making the NHL full-time. So, another prospect.
Ronty may not be remembered well now, but he was the Bruins' leading scorer in 48-49 and 49-50. His career derailed in his mid-20's when he apparently lost interest in hockey, started talking about retiring, which got him traded, and then followed through on the retirement talk at 26 when he didn't like his contract offer that summer.
So, what it boils down to is an aging goalie and two good prospects for a 20-year-old who's just entered his prime (and McLenahan, a throw-in, albeit a pretty good minor leaguer.)
As for why the AI made the deal, it's not entirely clear which team initiated it. If Toronto has acquired another goalie, then it'd be trying to offload Broda and be willing to sell at a loss. The Bruins have Frank Brimsek starting to decline in goal (in real life, they sold him to Chicago the next year), so they may have wanted a replacement there - Broda's not a great choice, being slightly older, but the goaltending pool is a little weak that year, so the options are limited. The third possibility would be that Leafs may have been looking for a centre, but I doubt it, they have several good ones in the late 1940's.
But the heart of the deal is Broda for Ronty, and Ronty, a rising star, is going to be worth more than a declining goalie. So both sides attempt to complete the deal by adding pieces, and it turns out that adding two good prospects to one side and a minor leaguer to the other gets it to a point where both sides are satisfied. Aside from depth chart considerations, the teams's basic roster-building strategies (win now or build for the future) would have entered into it as well, but in this case both finished in the lower half of the league and would've valued prospects more. That would've lowered Broda's value and increased that of the other 4, so it was likely a wash.
If the AI was just looking at the literal amount of value each player would add in the future, no, Toronto would never make that deal. But it doesn't know that Ronty is going to flame out and be done early, or that Horton will play into the 1970's. Obviously, if you want, you can exploit that and get good deals on players you know will last. We could change the AI in historical mode so it has perfect knowledge of exactly how much each player will contribute in the future, but I'm not sure that's a good solution - then a star with an abbreviated career, like Cam Neely, will get undervalued.