Shea Weber is a four-time NHL All-Star who has finished top-eight in the Norris voting six times in his 10-year career. He is very, very good.

But the question of how much longer that will be the case has some in Nashville wondering whether he's in decline, and has others elsewhere, including our own Josh Cooper, advocating for a trade. Weber has been the face of the Predators for so long at this point that such a scenario seems impossible. Seeing Weber on another team would feel somehow wrong, given that he's been with the Predators since there was a salary cap.

While no one is saying Weber isn't still very good, it's clear that his best years are almost behind him; we have enough information about how players age to know that rugged defenders — even those who fill the net, and Weber basically guarantees you a goal total in the mid-teens from the blue line — start losing steam around that age, and two or three years on from that, you start to see the bottom drop out on plenty of guys.

That's not to say Weber doesn't have three, four, five, or more years left of being a high-quality defenseman in the NHL — Zdeno Chara, for instance, is still very, very good at 38 (though his peak was much better than Weber's) — but that is to say that he's probably also not going to be what we think of as Shea Weber-quality for that long. The thing is, NHL teams mostly seem to start thinking, “Maybe we should trade this franchise cornerstone,” when they get into their low- or mid-30s. By then a bit of the shine has started to come off the guy's game, but he's still usually regarded as a quality addition to whichever team trades for him. With that in mind, then, one has to wonder whether it's time to start thinking about trades of even elite players right around their 30th birthday.

The idea of trading players within a few months of their 30th birthday — Weber hits the big three-oh on Aug. 14 — is an intriguing one. Would David Poile immediately get back fair value for him? No, simply because there are few defensemen in the league as good as Weber (though I'd argue he's a bit overrated because of his goal totals). But if you can get top-end prospects and young roster players who likewise have reasonably high ceilings, then there is a long-term benefit. Given the way the cap work, you probably also have to take back a veteran on a middling deal, but that's the cost of doing business. The net impact is “worse team now, potentially better team three years from now.”

The issue for the Predators is a simple one: To some extent their loss to Chicago in the first round last season is not an indicator of their overall quality (i.e. they're better than several teams across the league that made it to the second round, and beyond). But at the same time, they're clearly not on the level of some of the elite teams in this league because, well, most aren't. While a team with a goaltender as good as Pekka Rinne can certainly fluke its way past any team no matter how overmatched it “should” be, if you were making a list of the top eight or so teams in the league, I'm not sure Nashville would be on it.

And so the question becomes whether Poile wants to carry Weber on the roster — paying him huge money against the cap — in the early stages of his decline. The thing Cooper said yesterday about, “Why wait to find out if his down year as a 29-year-old is an aberration or part of a trend that's only going to pick up steam?” rings true here. The value he could fetch by auctioning off Weber isn't likely to get much higher than it is right now. Again, a “down year” for him was a 15-goal season in which he was a (marginally) positive possession player. Most teams take that kind of down year for their best defenseman and walk away smiling.

The problem you have to acknowledge is that the market for a player such as Weber is going to be limited unless you're taking plenty of bad-contract money back (or retain salary). If teams in the market for a defenseman are having trouble figuring out whether they can squeeze Cody Franson into their payroll structure, making almost $7.86 million work is obviously not going to get easier. But it also shouldn't be like the Dougie Hamilton situation, where afterward teams said they didn't even know it was available, so there would be a market at the end of the day.

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