TRADE TREE: Lethbridge-Seattle Blockbuster Still Rolling Out

The headline pretty much said it all.

“Lethbridge Hurricanes peddle problem pair to Seattle Thunderbirds.”

It was a dark time in the club’s history and things were about to get rockier. Forwards Jaimen Yakubowski and Sam McKechnie, a couple of skilled players, were sent home to wait for a trade and they got exactly that almost six years ago now.

They were sent to Seattle for 17-year-old Carter Folk, 19-year-old Riley Sheen and a third-round pick in 2015.

Now, we did kind of allude to this deal in a trade tree we did over two years ago in our “Roadmap to Ryan Bowen” blog. But we didn’t really go into it headfirst, because the ramifications of this deal are actually still being felt to this day.

Let’s start with Folk. As an overager in September 2016, he was sent to Victoria for a fourth-round pick in the 2017 draft. The Hurricanes used that pick to nab forward Drew Englot, who didn’t play a game for the team before he was sent to Regina, where he is playing this season. The ‘Canes acquired a fourth-round pick in 2022 for Englot. So we might have to revisit this blog in a few years.

Moving on to Sheen. He was later traded with a conditional pick to Red Deer for forward Brayden Burke and Devan Fafard. Burke was sent to Moose Jaw for the aforementioned Ryan Bowen as well as two draft picks: a second-rounder in 2017 and a conditional pick in 2019. That second-rounder turned into netminder Bryan Thomson, while I’m not totally certain on the conditional pick, but the Hurricanes did pick in Moose Jaw’s spot in the third round and nabbed defenseman Logan McCutcheon.

To finish the loop on Bowen, he was sent to Kelowna for an eighth-round pick in the 2019 draft. The Hurricanes used it to select defenseman Kaden Dyck.

Last but certainly not least, we go to that third-rounder in 2015 picked up from Seattle. The Hurricanes selected Tyler Strath with that pick. He was later moved to Kootenay with a conditional draft pick for Austin Wong, the little brother of former captain Tyler Wong. Austin didn’t play in the WHL as he had his eyes set on the NCAA and this year marks his first at Harvard.

So if you’re a Lethbridge Hurricanes fan, the long story short on this trade tree is that it’s almost too early still, weirdly enough, to think of the original deal with Seattle as the “worst in league history” as some thought it might be, given the trickle down effect we still haven’t seen yet.