Matt Irwin has not been good during his tenure with the Nashville Predators. He had a promising first season in limited minutes, and then that promise fizzled and faded like dew in the sun. He’s been defensively poor, lacks offensive skill to make up for it, and is neither fast nor physical. He’s not good for a NHL player, which is to say that he’s still among the top thousand or two men in the world at playing ice hockey.
Somehow, incredibly, David Poile has managed to find an unquestionably worse defender than Irwin, and then allowed himself to be persuaded to exchange actual assets for that defender.