Every first-round pick from this year’s draft that's changed hands, ranked by regret

The first round of this year’s draft is going to take some work to keep track of. Last week’s deadline saw three trades involving first-rounders in this year’s draft alone. That brings the total number of picks that have changed hands from just that round to an even dozen, potentially, although some will depend on conditions.

Of course, not all of the teams involved in those moves would make them over again. So today, let’s get you caught up on which picks have moved while also turning this into a ranking of regret. We’ll go through all 12 picks, ranked from the ones whose former teams have no regrets at all to those where a team might like a do-over.

We’ll start with the least-regrettable of them all, which turns out not to be a very tough choice…

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NHL weekend rankings: The Caps, the Oilers, and a deadline of swings and misses

Well, that was a bit of a weird deadline. It wasn’t a bad one, although I’m not sure it will rank all that highly among the best of the best. It had some decent names, and at least one surprise that we’ll get to down below. It also had plenty of names that we were told to watch out for that didn’t end up going anywhere.

If you missed it over the week, you can get caught up here: Trade grades for all the big deals, the classic winners and losers, and grades for each team.

In theory, a deadline week’s worth of player movement should cause some churn in the rankings. In reality, the deadline was a reasonably quiet one. How does that all play out? We’ll find out in a bit, but first let’s lay the deadline to rest with a few final thoughts.

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Lose-lose trades, potato GMs, gold medals vs. Stanley Cups, and more: DGB mailbag

Today is a slow news day in the hockey world, so let’s do a mailbag.

All I ask from you with these questions is three things: Ask about trade deadline stuff, keep it fun, and don’t get all weird on me. Can you guys handle that for an entire mailbag? Let’s find out.

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Should this team make a big deadline deal? (Spoiler: Yes, but they probably won't)

It’s trade deadline week. Should your favorite team do something big? Yes. Will they? Probably not.

That’s life in the NHL, a results-oriented league where the outcome is all that matters unless you’re a GM, in which case you’re allowed to mumble about your job being hard and everyone is supposed to feel sorry for you. These guys have only had four months to figure this stuff out since the season started, including two weeks off during the Olympics. Be reasonable.

Or don’t. Today, we’re going to give that option a try. We’ll pick a team and lay out the honest and yes, reasonable view for why they should play it safe and avoid any truly major moves. And then we’ll try to make the case for why they should break the mold and actually take a big swing.

We tried this last year, with all 32 teams. This year, we’re going to cut that list down. Some teams are obvious sellers who shouldn’t any convincing. Others will obviously buy. By my count, there are at least five scenarios that could see a team on the fence about a blockbuster.

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NHL weekend rankings: 5 post-Olympic break overreactions (unless they're not)

Welcome back to the NHL weekend rankings, returning after a three-week Olympic break. Aw, I missed you too.

Of course, those three weeks only contained a handful of NHL games for each team, so in theory our outlook on the league shouldn’t have changed too much. In theory, sure. But this is the real world, where half our job as fans is to overreact to anything and everything.

So today, before we get to the Top Five and Bottom Five, let’s first take a moment to pick a few teams and go way overboard based on their first few games back from the Olympic break.

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