Let's trade Tomas Kaberle to the Wings. Or anyone. For anything.

I’ve been thinking that Tomas Kaberle might be attractive to the Wings since they struck out on Ryan Suter. They would have to make the leap of faith that they are getting the Tomas Kaberle of five years ago, as opposed to the ineffectual and uncommitted disaster of the last couple of years. Maybe they get intel from the Czech Republic and investigate whether the summer training program with Tomas Plekanec is paying dividends, especially compared to his admitted botched efforts after last summer’s Stanley Cup partying.

Trading Tomas Kaberle would be a case of addition by subtraction, in that the quartet he forms with Raphaël Diaz, Yannick Weber and Frédéric St-Denis all bring a lot of the same skillset, and do not bring a lot of toughness and defensive ability. Since all four are eligible for waivers, and we will have nine defencemen under contract who we can’t sneak down to Hamilton once P.K. is signed, we need to start flipping one or more of these four guys for future assets instead of just losing them for nothing.

His contract is looking more palatable after this off-season, two more years at 4.5M is not quite Widemanesque. It is now off-loadable, and we benefit by ridding ourselves of that cap hit.

Everyone writes off Yannick Weber and Raphaël Diaz as nothing more than trade fodder, but they’re both young defencemen with skills who have room to improve, I’d rather invest the icetime in those two than Mr. Kaberle, who’s more valuable as a missing piece on a contender. Let’s cash in on any value he may have. We’ll probably get lucky sneaking down Frédéric St-Denis to Hamilton earlier in the season, he doesn’t have the pedigree and size that Jeff Woywitka has and caused him to be snapped up last fall.