Trade Analysis: Pittsburgh Penguins acquire Erik Karlsson from San Jose Sharks

Erik Karlsson is a Pittsburgh Penguin. What a strange sentence that is.

The Penguins, San Jose Sharks, and Montréal Canadiens front offices took a weekend off from golfing and fishing to complete one of the most convoluted trades in recent memory, involving no-trade clauses, six full-time NHLers moving, and a handful of picks and prospects.

For Pittsburgh, it means adding an elite but flawed talent on the cheap to an aging team that desperately needed a jolt. For the Sharks, it means clearing the decks for a multi-year rebuild and getting whatever asset you could out of a contract that could swing back to nightmarish real soon. For the Habs, it means coming out well ahead in exchange for being helpful.

To make some sense of this dizzying trade, I'll go team-by-team and player-by-player, analyzing them using metrics created by TopDownHockey and stats tracked by AllThreeZones to assess what kinds of players they are and what can be expected from them moving forward.