7 NHL Players Former Teams Gave Up on Too Soon

It's late at night, and your mind starts to wander. Back to times that seemed better. Back to memories of an old flame. A person you used to speak to every day is now just a trace of an outline in your memory.

Maybe you put on "Heat Waves" by Glass Animals to really set the mood as you reflect.

Sadly, this person is no longer in your life because of a mistake you made. You gave up on them too soon, and now, as you check their social media to see how they're doing, you realize just how big of a blunder you made.

They have the job they were working toward when you were together. Their profile photo is of them standing on a beach with their happy, healthy family. That could have been you, but you lost patience. You gave up.

This happens in the NHL all the time. A general manager or team drafts a player, only to get frustrated by their development—or lack thereof. So they move on, dealing the skater away to another organization that sees some promise.

A year or two later, they're contributing at the level they were supposed to, and the original team is left wondering how they whiffed on their own internal player assessment.

Valentine's Day seems like the perfect time to look back and examine times when NHL teams or general managers pulled the plug on their relationship with a player just a bit too soon. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, some of the league's bottom-dwellers show up on this list more than once, signaling why they can't climb out of the basement.

Which one of these do you think stings the most as their O.G. club looks on as their former player succeeds elsewhere? Who has your favorite team given up on that you regret the most? Sound off in the comments and let us know.

Now on to the heartbreak.

And a shoutout to Lyle Richardson and Lyle Fitzsimmons for contributing some of these ideas to this column.

Anthony Duclair

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He's not the biggest name on this list, but Anthony Duclair is the genesis of this story idea. And it's amazing what the right fit can do for a player's career. Five NHL teams gave up on the former third-round draft pick before he clicked in a top-six role for the Florida Panthers.

To be fair, skating alongside two of the most creative players in the sport has helped boost Duclair's production. Yet you can't ignore the fact that he's 100 percent jelled with Jonathan Huberdeau and Aleksander Barkov.

He's not the one driving that bus, but man has he made the most of the opportunity to be a passenger. The right wing bounced between five franchises within the first six seasons of his career and was a target for criticism during several of those stops.

His time with the Arizona Coyotes and Columbus Blue Jackets was particularly tumultuous. Duclair requested to be traded out of the desert after becoming frustrated with his role, and while in Columbus, then-head coach John Tortorella had unpleasant things to say about the forward.

Florida took a chance on him in 2020, and Duclair has rewarded the team with steady production since. His first season with the Panthers earned him a three-year extension, and this seems like the perfect fit for the once-wayward scorer.

Filip Forsberg

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It's important to consider the context when examining the Washington Capitals' decision to trade Filip Forsberg for Martin Erat back in 2013 at the trade deadline. The team was struggling to do much damage in the playoffs during that portion of the Alex Ovechkin era and badly wanted to add some win-now talent.

Then-general manager George McPhee was frank when discussing the trade.

"You're here to win. We've been in that mode for a while. This is six years of trying to win a Cup," McPhee said, according to Katie Carrera of the Washington Post. "We had our rebuild phase, we sort of rebuilt things on the fly here, but we'd like to continue to make the playoffs while we're doing it."

Erat appeared in nine regular-season games for the Capitals and scored just one goal. Washington then lost in the first round to the New York Rangers via a soul-crushing 5-0 Game 7 loss. Erat appeared in four of those contests, scoring no points and accumulating four PIMs.

So much for acquiring the veteran to win now.

All Forsberg has done for the Nashville Predators is become their fifth-all-time leading scorer with 424 points in 531 games. His scoring prowess makes this one of the most lopsided trades of the modern era.

Had Washington gotten over the hump and won the Stanley Cup, this swap probably wouldn't be remembered so poorly. That didn't happen, though, and Forsberg has become a staple in Nashville.

Zdeno Chara

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The New York Islanders gave Zdeno Chara four years and 231 regular-season games to cash in on his potential. They eventually became enamored with Alexei Yashin, so much so that they included the hulking blueliner in a trade that would set back the organization years, if not a decade.

Chara would evolve into a dominating force with the Ottawa Senators and went on to become one of the biggest and most important free-agent signings early in the salary-cap era. His 14-year run with the Boston Bruins is nothing short of legendary.

He anchored a Stanley Cup champion in 2011, won the Norris Trophy as the league's top defenseman in 2008-09 and appeared in a whopping 943 regular-season games for the club.

Meanwhile, Yashin was nothing short of a disaster on Long Island. So much so that it's something that is still discussed to this day. The general manager who made the deal, Mike Milbury, is still maligned by the Islanders' fanbase and just might be one of the worst GMs in the history of the league.

Any time you trade away a likely Hall of Famer, it's not going to work out well for you. The Islanders gave up just a bit too soon on Chara, and it's interesting to think how different things would have worked out for both New York and Boston had the Islanders not traded him to the Senators.

William Karlsson

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This is another one that stings for fans of the Blue Jackets. As the Vegas Golden Knights were gearing up for the expansion draft, Columbus didn't want to lose either Josh Anderson or Joonas Korpisalo to the new club. So they actually paid Vegas to stay away from these two players, sending William Karlsson, their 24th overall pick in 2017 and David Clarkson to the Golden Knights to protect their at-the-time core.

You can't win 'em all, but this is a brutal trade for the Jackets in hindsight.

Karlsson quickly became a top-six center in Nevada, leading the team in points and goals during their inaugural season. He scored 43 times in 2017-18, which, for whatever it's worth, would have been the most productive goal-scoring season in Blue Jackets history.

This caused former Columbus coach John Tortorella to wonder why he couldn't get that kind of offensive production out of Karlsson. Playing him a little more than 13 minutes a night might have had something to do with it, but we digress.

His first year in Vegas wasn't a flash in the pan, either. His 0.71 points per game since 2019-20 puts him in the same territory as the likes of former Hart Trophy winner Taylor Hall and other standout centers like Bo Horvat and Brayden Schenn. 

Meanwhile, Anderson reportedly requested a trade out of Columbus in September 2017 and is now with the Montreal Canadiens, while Korpisalo has seen his game fall off drastically this year.

Andre Burakovsky

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Here's another situation that unfolded when an organization gave a drafted player time and space to develop and things just didn't work out. That happens sometimes. Andre Burakovsky is a fantastic player and has settled in wonderfully with the powerhouse Colorado Avalanche.

On the other side, the Capitals were simply doing what they thought was right at the time. There was no big blowout, just a few months of rumors that culminated in Burakovsky asking for a trade so that he might have an opportunity to play in a top-six role.

His inconsistency was an issue with the Capitals, and reports from the time suggest that the coaching staff was ready to move on from Burakovsky as a third-line forward. Kind of like with Karlsson in Columbus, though, you have to wonder whether things could have gone differently if a chance to shine was afforded to the player.

He averaged just north of 11 minutes per game during his last season in Washington. That jumped to more than 15 minutes per contest in 2019-20, and Burakovsky has 125 points in 154 contests with the Avalanche, starring in the top-six role that he asked for from the Capitals. 

They couldn't give him what he wanted, so he sought it out elsewhere and is doing all the better for it. It is kind of strange to think that the aging Washington core could look a lot different with Forsberg and Burakovsky still in the fold.

Markus Naslund

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Look, the Pittsburgh Penguins were loaded with offensive talent at the time of the Markus Naslund trade. It was March 1996, and that team was led by names such as Mario Lemieux, Ron Francis and likely robot Jaromir Jagr.

That put them in the position to trade away the 16th overall pick from the 1991 draft, right? Check the rafters at Rogers Arena for your answer to that question. The player Pittsburgh received in the deal, Alek Stojanov, would skate in 45 games for the franchise, scoring two goals.

Meanwhile, if Vancouver decided to print its own currency for whatever reason, odds seem good that Naslund's face would end up on one of the bills. He was the face of the franchise for 12 years and appeared in 884 games for the Canucks.

Maybe he doesn't evolve into that kind of player while stuck behind legends like Jagr and Lemieux, but the Penguins still traded away a skater who became an icon for nothing. If that's not giving up on someone too soon, we don't know what is.

It wasn't a big deal when it happened, and Pittsburgh couldn't have known that Stojanov would be in a car accident that would negatively affect his career. Still, this is another case of a team whiffing badly on assessing a player's ceiling, failing to realize what they had before shipping him out for two jars of pickles, a loaf of bread and some mayonnaise.

Brett Hull

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For the Calgary Flames, winning the Stanley Cup was all that mattered in 1988. They were favorites to skate away with their first championship in franchise history and wanted to add the ol' veteran depth ahead of the playoffs.

The cost for that kind of depth hasn't changed much over the years. Calgary shipped out a young Brett Hull (along with Steve Bozek) to the St. Louis Blues for Rob Ramage and Rick Wamsley. The Flames wouldn't win the Stanley Cup that year but would the next with Ramage and Wamsley still on the roster, with the former skating as a useful defenseman for the Flames.

Championship or bust for sure, but Hull went on to become one of the greatest goal scorers in the history of the NHL. He played important roles on almost every team he ever skated on, winning the Stanley Cup twice—albeit once with his foot in the crease while scoring the series-clinching tally—and was a no-brainer Hall of Fame inductee.

Would the Flames have swapped out that Stanley Cup parade for another 10 years of Hull? That's how long he stuck in St. Louis, skating in 744 regular-season games with the club, scoring 527 times and accumulating 936 points.

Regardless of which side of that debate you land on, there's no denying that Calgary moved on from Hull too early and that he would be remembered as one of the best-ever Flames had the swap not happened.

Statistics appear courtesy of StatHead, Hockey Reference and HockeyDB.com and are accurate through games played Feb. 11, 2022.