What’s the best starting lineup you could make from a single GM’s trade history?

With​ less than a week​ to​ go​ until​ the​ 2019​ trade deadline,​ all eyes are​ on NHL general​ managers.​ Within minutes of​​ Monday’s 3:00 p.m. ET deadline, everyone will be coming up with their lists of winners and losers. Some GMs will be found wanting, while others will be declared the champions of the day.

But we like to think a little bigger around here. So instead of wondering about who’ll be the best NHL GM of the 2019 deadline, let’s aim higher by trying to determine the best big-game hunter in history. Which GM holds the all-time crown when it comes to going and swinging big deals?

A few months ago, I tried to tackle a similar sort of question from a slightly different angle by following a chain of lopsided trades. I thought it was pretty much perfect methodology, but a few readers didn’t seem to agree with where it ended up. OK, fair enough. So let’s try something else.

Today, we’re going to see which NHL GM from the modern era lets us put together the best six-man starting lineup made up entirely of players that they traded for. We’re looking for a goalie, two defensemen and three forwards, all of them acquired by the same GM in various trades.

We can mix and match between teams for those GMs who’ve held multiple jobs. But we’re looking for trades and trades only – drafting, free agency and other kind of transactions won’t help you here. We’re not really looking for the “best” GM here, and we don’t even really care if they won or lost the deal. One way or another, we’re looking to crown the guy who landed the biggest names.

A couple of key ground rules:

– The GM only gets credit for what the player did with the team that acquired them. Trading for a Hall of Famer at the very end of his career doesn’t get your credit for his entire body of work. But you do get credit for whatever they did with the team, even if you weren’t around to see all of it.

– We’re only counting players who were acquired directly, not picks that were eventually used on star players.

That last rule is important for a couple of reasons. First, it prevents GMs from getting credit for players they lucked into thanks to their scouting department nailing some fourth-round pick. But more importantly, we need this rule to make this any sort of a contest instead of a coronation of Sam Pollock. If we’re counting picks, Pollock gets to start his team with names like Guy Lafleur, Larry Robinson, Steve Shutt and Bob Gainey, and the whole thing is over before it starts. Sam’s too good, so we need a rule to hold him back.

But it’s a tribute to Pollock that while we’re intentionally stacking the deck against him, he still comes through with a solid roster. Let’s make him our starting point.

(GM trading records are via NHLtradetracker.com.)

Team Sam Pollock

Goalie: Ken Dryden

Defensemen: Don Awrey, Jimmy Roberts

Forwards: Frank Mahovlich, Pete Mahovlich, Dick Duff

Team Pollock can’t use Lafleur, Robinson or the other draft pick heists, but still comes out looking pretty good. They start with a Hall of Famer in Dryden, whose rights Pollock stole from the Bruins in one of his very first trades back in 1964. They also get the Mahovlich brothers, plus six years of Duff’s Hall of Fame career. The defense is weak and that’s even after we’re cheating a bit with Roberts, who played more on the wing than the blueline in Montreal, but we kind of have to – even though he made a ton of trades, most of Pollock’s deals were for picks or cash, not established players.

So all in all, Team Pollock is pretty good. But will it hold up as the best? Let’s usher in a new challenger.

Team Harry Sinden

Goalie: Gilles Gilbert

Defensemen: Brad Park, Mike O’Connell

Forwards: Cam Neely, Rick Middleton, Adam Oates

Sinden’s team is just OK in goal – as you’ll see, that ends up being a bit of a theme for a few of his colleagues too. But the rest of his roster is pretty darn good. And he’s got some depth to draw on, as we’ve left off names like Jean Ratelle. The only real weak point is that second defenseman slot, which would look a lot better if our draft pick rule wasn’t keeping Ray Bourque off the team. But having future Sinden protégé Mike O’Connell on the squad makes a certain kind of sense, so let’s go with that.

Sinden’s Bruins didn’t beat Pollock’s Habs all that much when it mattered back in the 1970s, but I think he has the edge here. But he’ll need to get past some other strong contenders.

Team Bill Torrey

Goalie: Chico Resch

Defensemen: Jean Potvin, Uwe Krupp

Forwards: Butch Goring, Pierre Turgeon, Bob Bourne

As with Sinden, goalie isn’t a strong suit, although it’s not bad; Resch basically wins by default, since Billy Smith was an expansion pick and not a trade. Torrey also suffers a bit on the blueline, partly because he was pretty good at drafting them and didn’t need to trade for them as often as other guys. Jean Potvin might not be the best Potvin brother the Islanders ever had, but he put in a solid 400 games for them, and Krupp was decent too. Torrey’s best position is up front, where he could also lay claim to guys like Ray Ferraro and Stumpy Thomas.

Sinden, Torrey and Pollock represent the classic franchise-defining GMs of the 1970s. There’s one more we need to get to, although this one is sometimes better remembered for the work he did in another market.

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Who's the best GM of all time? Just follow the bad trade chain.

Who’s​ the best general​ manager​ in​ the​ history​ of​ the NHL?

On​ the surface, that​ seems like the​ sort​ of question that​​ we can’t really answer. You’ll have your opinion and I’ll have mine, and we can have fun debating it back and forth. But ultimately, it’s all a matter of opinion.

Or is it? When it comes to these sorts of questions, I’ve always been a big fan of stripping away emotion and hometown bias and going with a calculated, scientific approach. And there’s an opportunity to do that here, because part of a GM’s job involves occasionally going head-to-head with their colleagues. We can never read too much into a matchup between goalies or coaches or players, because the results will be determined by the rosters around them. But when GMs sit down to hammer out a trade, it’s just them. Just two men, locked in a battle of wits to see who can get the best of the other.

That should give us an opportunity to answer the question of who was the best in an objective way. All we need to do is go back through the trading records and see who got the best of who. After all, you can’t be the best GM ever if some other GM took you to the cleaners in a head-to-head matchup. We just need to work our way down the chain, looking for any trades that were clearly lopsided, and we’ll eventually get to an answer we can all agree on. It’s practically foolproof.

The only question is where to begin. That’s tricky, but I think there’s a logical answer: We start with the reigning GM of the Year. After all, if the league says a guy is the best in the business at this very moment, that seems like as good a place as any to start our search.

As it happens, the current GM of the Year is a legitimate contender for our Best Ever crown. That would be George McPhee, who won the 2018 award after working a near-miracle with the Golden Knights. He has nearly two decades of experience as an NHL GM, and he’s taken two teams to the Stanley Cup final. If you’re looking for someone to call the best, you could do a lot worse than George McPhee.

Except that for all McPhee’s success, he made one of the worst trades in recent history back in 2013, when he sent Filip Forsberg to the Predators for Martin Erat and a minor leaguer. It was a disastrous trade, as Forsberg quickly developed into one of the league’s best young wingers while Erat barely did anything in Washington. The deal has been referred to as a “dumpster fire”. And who was the GM who robbed McPhee blind in that deal? That would be David Poile.

So McPhee clearly can’t be the best GM ever. Instead, it’s Poile. See how this works? Simple and straightforward.

Except that while Poile certainly won his fair share of trades over his 36 years on the job, his record isn’t exactly spotless. Back in 1992, Poile was GM of the Capitals when he traded winger Dino Ciccarelli to the Red Wings in a straight-up deal for Kevin Miller. The 31-year-old Ciccarelli had scored over 100 goals in his three full seasons in Washington; he turned out to have over 160 more left in him, on the way to joining the 600-goal club and making the Hall of Fame. Miller lasted all of 10 games in Washington.

So sorry, David, you can’t be the best GM of all-time when you get robbed like that. Instead, we’ll hand those honors over to the man that fleeced you: Red Wings’ GM Bryan Murray.

Murray’s a solid pick; he was a GM for four different teams over the course of a quarter century. Unfortunately, he also had some shaky deals. Back in 2013, he traded Jakob Silfverberg, Stefan Noesen and a first-round pick to the Ducks in a deal for winger Bobby Ryan. That pick ended up being in the top 10, and the Ducks used it on Nick Ritchie. Meanwhile, Ryan has largely been a bust in Ottawa, and the team is currently trying to unload his massive contract. It was a clear loss for the Senators, and a win for Anaheim GM Bob “No Relation” Murray.

So Bryan can’t be our best-ever GM. But maybe Bob can be.

Unfortunately, the best GM ever wouldn’t have traded one of the top defensemen in the league without getting any impact assets back in return. That’s what Murray did back in 2009, when Paul Holmgren got him to part with Chris Pronger for the low price of Joffrey Lupul, Lucas Sbisa and two late first-round picks. Pronger immediately led the Flyers to within two wins of a championship, making the deal a big win for GM Paul Holmgren.

So Murray isn’t the best GM after all. Paul Holmgren is.

Except that he can’t be, because he once traded James van Riemsdyk to the Maple Leafs in a straight-up deal for Luke Schenn. That was a bad deal on the day it went down, and has been getting worse ever since. Schenn was barely a useful third-pairing guy, while van Riemsdyk had multiple 30-goal seasons in Toronto and just got a ton of money to come back to the Flyers. Chalk up a big win for Leafs GM Brian Burke.

So Holmgren is out. The best GM ever was actually Brian Burke.

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