Welcome to deadline week. Let’s get caught up, before something else happens and this is all out-of-date.
The Devils won the Timo Meier sweepstakes, ending weeks of speculation by closing the deal yesterday (and then making us all wait for hours to find out what it actually was, but who’s counting). That’s a huge deal, not just as far as what it does to the Eastern race, but also in terms of which other players now get circled back on. The consensus is that the Devils did well for themselves, although it's hard to say given that the full deal includes roughly eight players that nobody had heard of until last night.
Others trades over the weekend included Nino Niederreiter to Winnipeg, Barbashev to Vegas and Evgeni Dadonov to Dallas. That made for an interesting swing, with the veterans heading to the Western Conference after it was the East that had been landing the big names for the past few weeks. We also learned of a major change in Nashville, where David Poile will be stepping down as GM at the end of the season, to be replaced by Barry Trotz.
Then there’s the big news of a trade that hasn’t officially happened yet, but is apparently a done deal: Patrick Kane to the Rangers, who appear to be the only team he’s willing to move to. If so, the Hawks will have to take what they can get, which likely won’t be much. We’re told that the Rangers may need to wait for later in the week before they can work the deal under the cap, which led to some weekend lineup oddities. But according to all the insiders, this is happening.
On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- The Eastern wildcard race gets crazy
- Patrick Kane is on fire, but is he on the way out?
- Jesse Granger explains the Shea Weber trade
- Phil Kessel is good again
- Listeners respond to my magic draft picks idea
- Ray Sheppard makes history and more...
The Athletic Hockey Show runs most days of the week during the season, with Ian and I hosting every Thursday. There are two versions of each episode available:
- An ad-free version for subscribers that you can find here
- An ad-supported version you can get for free wherever you normally find your podcasts (like Apple or Spotify)
One of the things that happens when you do a power rankings, especially one that’s limited to a few teams, is that fans get mad at you. Where’s my team? Why aren’t they higher? Do you even watch them? It’s part of the deal, and up to a point it even adds to the fun.
Then you have these rankings, and readers who have a different question: How much would it cost us to bribe you to never mention us again?
It happened again last week, when I wondered if the Oilers were becoming a Western force. Full disclosure, I wrote most of that take on Sunday morning, assuming they’d be able to handle the Habs later that day. They lost that game, by a lot, and then lost to the Red Wings too. Message received, Oilers, I won’t bother you again.
Look, I think I do a pretty good job with these rankings. At the end of the year, when we look back on them, they almost always hold up well. I like that we try not to get caught up in short-term swings, and I think it helps us paint a more realistic picture. I stand by my work.
But also, yes, there does seem to be a disturbing trend of teams that are playing well getting a pat on the back in this column, and then immediately forgetting how to hockey.
Let’s just put it on the table: These rankings might be cursed. We should dig into the evidence.
Top five times these rankings cursed a team (maybe)
5. Dallas Stars, January 2 – After being hesitant on the Stars on year long, I finally put them in the top five as part of a New Year’s shakeup. They debuted at a lofty number three, partly on the strength of a four-game win streak. They immediately Kings and Ducks(!), and have lost 11 of 18 since that ranking.
4. Maple Leafs, December 13 – The Leafs didn’t just crack the top five, they got a whole section explaining why. (You have to do this when so many fans have made complaining about a team their entire personality.) They’d won four in a row and nine of ten. They immediately lost their next two, and five of nine.
3. Sabres, January 30 – I didn’t put them in the top five, but I did pump their tires pretty hard, and made that the case for why you should bandwagon their playoff push. Did you listen? I hope not, because they got crushed 5-1 in their next game and Tage Thompson left with an injury. They’d end up losing four straight, seeing their playoff hopes dwindle back down to long shot territory.
On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- Every veteran defenseman retires
- We remember how cool P.K. Subban and Zdeno Chara were
- Nathan MacKinnon gets a new contract
- Blake Wheeler is out as Jets captain
- The Oilers have a type
- Ryan quizzes me on all the new coaches
- Survivor talk and lots more...
On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Kokak Black enjoys a Florida Panthers game
- Connor McDavid's tepid answer about Evanker Kane
- Tuukka Rask returns
- Bobby Clarke rips Ron Hextall, and I'm not buying it
- Jack Eichel nears a return in Vegas
- Plus Cale Makar's Hart chances, a listener question on the point system, the anniversary of "they're going home", and more
The Athletic Hockey Show runs most days of the week during the season, with Ian and I hosting every Thursday. There are two versions of each episode available:
- An ad-free version for subscribers that you can find here
- An ad-supported version you can get for free wherever you normally find your podcasts (like Apple or Spotify)
On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- More Evander Kane drama, and why the NHLPA needs to fight this
- We try to figure out which team might give him another chance
- The John Klingberg trade watch has arrived
- We get into just how bad this Coyotes rebuild could get
- Running down the various weird Atlantic goalie situations, including Tuukka Rask
- Plus Marc Bergevin, Bob Saget, and the debut of a new game called Gordle
On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- Wait, is Buffalo good now?
- We debate just how worried Montreal and Chicago fans should be
- The Evander Kane mess
- More Jack Eichel trade talk
- Does the Leafs backup goalie prove the salary cap is broken?
- NHL dress codes, wrestling finishers during hockey fights, OUFL Halloween costumes and more...
On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- We go division-by-division and make some picks for this year
- Robin Lehner drops some bombs on NHL culture
- More Jack Eichel drama
- A new Evander Kane accusation
- GM's on the hot seat
- A round of "Who he play for?" and lots more...
On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Nathan MacKinnon turns out to be a huge weirdo
- John Tortorella heads to ESPN, where he will probably be boring
- Thoughts on my prediction contest
- Jesse Granger explains the NHL's apparent double-standard when it comes to gambling
- Debating the league's worst current contract
- Lots of listener questions, remembering the Hasek trade, and lots more...
The Athletic Hockey Show runs most days of the week during the season, with Ian and I hosting every Thursday. There are two versions of each episode available:
- An ad-free version for subscribers that you can find here
- An ad-supported version you can get for free wherever you normally find your podcasts (like Apple or Spotify)
We’ve spent a good part of the last week sorting through the fallout of the draft lottery, which certainly gave us plenty to talk about. But we weren’t supposed to be doing this. Before the pandemic hit, the draft lottery was scheduled for April, and we were supposed to have spent the last week talking about the draft itself. The same Friday night the league was drawing ping pong balls and Bill Daly was flipping over generic logos, the NHL was supposed to be gathered in Montreal for Round 1 of the draft.
What if they had been? It’s impossible to know how it would have played out, although we’ll get some indication when the delayed draft is held, well, whenever they get around to it this fall. In the meantime, we’re left with that question: What if?
Alternate realities don’t sound like a bad option right now, so let’s do this. Here are five draft-themed what-if scenarios from modern NHL history and how they might have changed everything.
What if Eric Lindros had just put on the jersey?
The arbitration-mandated trade that sent Eric Lindros from Quebec to Philadelphia for a massive package that included Peter Forsberg is probably one of the most what-if’d transactions in NHL history. Most of those alternate realities revolve around the arbitrator making the decision he’d been expected to make at the time and awarding Lindros to the Rangers instead, for a package that was reported to include names like Tony Amonte, Alexei Kovalev and (maybe) Mike Richter. Lindros could have wound up somewhere like Chicago, Detroit or Montreal. I’ve offered up my own version where he lands in Toronto, and everything changes.
But there’s a simpler scenario that often gets overlooked: What if Lindros had just put on that Nordiques jersey? What if he’d never decided he didn’t want to play in Quebec or had been talked out of his stance or had backed down once training camp arrived and decided to report?
For one thing, Lindros would have arrived in the NHL in 1991 instead of heading back to junior. That might mean he adds a Calder Trophy to his resume instead of finishing miles behind Teemu Selanne in 1992-1993. It also means he misses the 1992 Olympics, which might cost Canada a medal.
Instead, he’d have been in Quebec, playing on a team that already had Joe Sakic, Mats Sundin and Owen Nolan. But they didn’t have much else – the real 91-92 Nordiques’ leading scorers included names like Mike Hough, Greg Paslawski and Mikhail Tatarinov, and starting goalie Stephane Fiset went into the season with nine career games on his NHL resume. Add Lindros, who scored 40 goals in his real-world rookie season, and they’d be a lot better than the 52-point team they were, but we won’t get silly and suggest they’d be a playoff team. Meanwhile, would the Flyers have had the patience to wait for Forsberg to arrive, or would they have used him as a trade chip to land some other big-name star?
But those aren’t the big questions. Instead, we want to know two things about our what-if Nordiques: Do they still move to Colorado and do they still go on to win multiple Stanley Cups?
I think the answer to the first question is yes, they do still end up moving. The NHL’s economics in the early ’90s were just about impossible for small-market Canadian teams to manage, and the clock was already ticking on the Nordiques by 1991. It’s possible that Lindros bursting onto the scene would have meant a reinvigorated fan base, a new arena and a team that puts down firmer roots that remain to this day. But it feels unlikely.
Still, Lindros might at least have bought them another season or two, which puts everything about their Colorado days in question, even if we assume they still wind up there eventually. Having Lindros instead of Forsberg might be close to a wash, although plenty of fans would tell you Forsberg was better, and there were plenty of other pieces from that trade tree that ended up being crucial. But more importantly, what if those Lindros-led Nordiques haven’t moved in time for the 1995-96 season? There’s no way the Habs trade Patrick Roy to their provincial rivals, and without him the Sakic-era Cups seem a lot less likely.
We never found out, which is good news for hockey fans in Colorado and bad news for those in Quebec.
What if there hadn’t been so much confusion over Pavel Bure’s draft eligibility?
The saga of Pavel Bure’s draft remains confusing to this day. Heading into the 1989 draft, Bure was considered one of hockey’s most dynamic prospects, but back in those days teams were hesitant to invest high picks in Soviet players who may have taken years to come to North America, if they ever did at all. Soviet players were almost always taken as late-round flyers, and the rules of the day said that an 18-year-old Bure was only eligible to be picked in the first three rounds because he hadn’t played two full pro seasons back home.
Or had he? While the threshold for a season was 11 games and Bure’s official records only listed five with CSKA Moscow in 1987-88 (and still do), the Canucks believed they’d uncovered evidence of six more. They believe Bure was eligible to be picked. And depending on who you believe, they weren’t the only ones.
According to Brian Burke, who helped the Canucks build their legal case, the only other team that knew about Bure’s mystery games was the Edmonton Oilers. But years later, a story emerged that the Red Wings were in the loop too, and that’s where the confusion really kicks in. According to Jim Lites, an executive with Detroit at the time, the Wings were ready to take Bure in the fifth round but were specifically told by the league that he wasn’t eligible. The Canucks called his name in the sixth round, other teams immediately objected, and everything went to hell.
What’s the best possible roster you could make out of NHL stars who were clearly not the best player in league history to have those initials? Let’s find out!
A few ground rules:
We’re going to let hockey-reference.com be our guide on the question of the “best” players. This turns out to be deceptively simple since their search engine defaults to sorting by a player’s importance. I think this is based largely (but not entirely) on point shares, which isn’t a perfect stat but will work well enough for our purposes. We search for a set of initials, and the first result that matches them is the best player and can’t be on our roster.
Except … I know this is all subjective, but I did run into a few cases where the search engine was just wrong, or at least where it felt like the top two guys were too close to call. When that happens, I reserve the right to overrule the site and disqualify a player we could otherwise use. This will make things harder, but it also means I won’t have to wade through 100 comments from people who think I took the easy way out because Mats Sundin is clearly better than Martin St. Louis no matter what some computer says. Remember, we said “clearly not the best,” so we only want guys where there’s no real case to be made that they could be at the top of their list.
Active players are in play, but we only get credit for what they’ve done in their careers so far. Connor McDavid has two Art Ross trophies, but with less than 500 career points might not make the roster yet. (And he’s already the best C.M. in league history, so we couldn’t use him anyway.)
We’re using whatever was considered a player’s most common name during their playing days.
We’re filling out a 20-man roster with four centers, four right wings, four left wings, six defensemen and a goalie.
Sounds like fun? (Crickets chirp.) Awesome, let’s do this!
We’ll start with the obvious problem: By definition, we’re not going to be able to use any of the NHL’s true all-time greats. Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr, Gordie Howe, Mario Lemieux … they’re all out.
That applies to pretty much all of the second tier too. It would be nice if a pair of top 10 players had been considerate enough to double up on initials, but that doesn’t really happen. There isn’t an NHL equivalent to the NBA’s Michael Jordan/Magic Johnson combo.
Well, except for maybe one: Who’s the best player in NHL history to have the initials D.H.?
That’s a tough one. You could make a case for Dominik Hasek, who might be the best goaltender of all-time. But there’s also Doug Harvey, who won seven Norris Trophies in eight years and was almost universally ranked as the best defenseman ever during the pre-Bobby Orr era.
I’d lean to Hasek, but the hockey-reference results go with Harvey. It’s a tough one because whichever way I go I’m going to have a big chunk of hockey fans mad at me. So I’m not going to pick at all, and instead, declare this one a tie – neither Hasek nor Harvey clearly fit our criteria, so neither can make our team.
The good news is that the D.H. listing still offers some possibilities, including Dany Heatley and Dale Hunter. But I’m going to go with 1980s legend Dale Hawerchuk, who can’t lay claim to a place in Hasek or Harvey’s tier but will slot in nicely as one of our centers.
And while we’re building from the middle, we should grab another obvious choice: Adam Oates, who brings us 1,400 points and a reputation as one of the greatest setup men of all time but still can’t get near the A.O. title when Alexander Ovechkin is around.
Let’s fill in a few more forward spots. Jean Beliveau is a consensus top-10 player of all-time, which means we can safely grab 500-goal man Johnny Bucyk at LW. And we find another strong LW choice in former MVP Taylor Hall, who’s available thanks to the 24-year career of Hall-of-Famer Tim Horton.
In the Friday Grab Bag:
- What were the GMs doing all week? My spies found out
- I'm feeling old so now I'm going to make you feel old too
- An obscure player who played the most games in net without a loss
- The week's three comedy stars
- And a YouTube look back at the Blackhawks kind of maybe trying to sing
In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- A debate about Bruce Boudreau gets a little heated
- What's up with the Leafs?
- Yet another outdoor game
- I have a hot take about speaking to the manager and rating employees
- Evander Kane's player safety criticism
- Thoughts on the trades so far
- Greg and Ryan place their bets on my trade deadline odds
p>Over the next few days, writers across this site will be looking back at the last decade in sports. You’ll read about the best players, the greatest moments, and most memorable games, as well as in-depth breakdowns of the most important stories and their lasting impact on the sport.
I was not asked to write any of those posts.
No, like any well-run team, The Athletic makes sure to use everyone in the role they’re best suited for. And that means that I was asked to write about the NHL’s 10 dumbest moments from the last decade.
My answer: I’m going to have a tough time narrowing the list down.
To be clear, we’re looking for dumb moments that were, for the most part, ultimately harmless; we’ll save the serious stuff for another day. Maybe these moments made us laugh at the time. Or maybe we only laugh when we look back in hindsight. Or maybe we don’t laugh at all, instead slowly lowering our head onto our desk and then sobbing quietly over why we ever let ourselves become a fan of this ridiculous league in the first place. You do you, I’m not going to tell you how to live your life.
We’ll do this in chronological order, because trying to rank these moments would be like asking me to rank my own children, except that my children can occassionaly go a few straight weeks without embarrassing me.
June 9, 2010: When sudden death isn’t all that sudden
Imagine being a middle-aged Blackhawks fan in 2010. Your team hasn’t won a Stanley Cup since 1961, before you were even born. They’ve come close, but never sealed the deal. You’ve literally waited your entire life just to see them score a Cup-winning goal.
And then they finally come through and win it all and… you still don’t see them score a Cup-winning goal.
In terms of immortal goal calls, you’ve got “Henderson has scored for Canada”, “May Day!” and “What a goal, what a move, Lemieux, OH BABY”. For the Hawks’ first Cup-winner in almost half a century, we got “To the net… [awkward silence]… Leighton stopped it… Where’s the puck?” That one might need some work.
But in defense of Jim Hughson, I didn’t realize the puck was in either. You probably didn’t. Just about everyone in the building seemed to miss it, including the referee and the goal judge. Other than Patrick Kane and Michael Leighton, nobody seemed to realize that the Blackhawks had just won the Stanley Cup.
It was the NHL’s first big moment of the 2010s, and nobody saw it. In hindsight, maybe that should have been a sign of what was to come for the rest of the decade.
Nov. 15, 2010: Email etiquette
One of the ongoing stories from the start of the decade was a lawsuit between the league and former referee Dean Warren. It was a marginally interesting story, if kind of dry and largely stuck in the legal weeds, and most fans probably didn’t pay much attention.
But Tyler Dellow did. Long before he was employed as a stats guru by NHL teams (or as a contributor at The Athletic), Dellow was a fan with a legal background who took an interest in the Warren case – specifically, with some emails that had been included in court filings. Those emails, sent between league executive Colin Campbell and former head of NHL officiating Stephen Walkom, were redacted because they were sensitive in nature. Only, as Dellow discovered, they weren’t redacted very well.
And so we all learned that Campbell had sent at least one email ranting about a call against his son, Gregory, and that he thought Marc Savard was “a little fake artist”. That was embarrassing enough, but the fact that the revelation came just months after Campbell had declined to suspend Matt Cooke for essentially ending Savard’s career only made matter worse.
Somehow, this wasn’t even the decade’s only controversy involving Campbell’s emails. Say what you will about how things were done in the old days, but you never saw Original Six executives getting embroiled in email scandals.
Nov. 9, 2011: The Flyers stage a Lightning strike
By the start of the new decade, the NHL was still firmly mired in the Dead Puck Era of defense-first thinking. But with the post-lockout rules limiting clutch-and-grab tactics and the lack of a red line hindering the old school neutral zone trap, the next generation of coaching minds had to come up with new ways to stifle the game.
One of those minds was Guy Boucher, who took over in Tampa in 2010 and immediately guided the Lightning to an impressive 103-point season based partly on his 1-3-1 system: One player back, three players across the neutral zone and one lone “forechecker” passively guiding the attacking team towards the traffic jam. It was a tough system to beat. But on November 9, 2011, Peter Laviolette’s Flyers figured out what to do: Nothing.
Literally. The first time they had control in their own zone and the Lightning set up their 1-3-1, the Flyers did nothing. Thirty seconds into a nationally televised showcase game, Chris Pronger got the puck, and just… stood there.
Nobody knew what to do. Pronger clearly wasn’t going to make a move. Boucher’s system meant the Lightning were under strict orders not to directly attack the puck-carrier. And as long as somebody is controlling the puck, there’s nothing in the rulebook that says that any of the players in a hockey game actually have to, you know, play hockey. The stand-off lasted 30 seconds before the officials blew the play dead, only to resume again when the same sequence played out a few minutes later, and again several times during the period.
In the Friday Grab Bag:
- A word to the fun police about celebrations
- What do about that Nashville Predators banner situation
- An obscure player who we all thought was going to be so much better
- The week's three comedy stars
- And a YouTube look back to the Dallas Stars making their NHL debut with space cowboys, probably
That’s a phrase you hear a lot around the NHL, especially at this time of year. When a team’s window is closed, it means they’re no longer a real threat to win the Stanley Cup. Maybe they won a Cup or two, but now those days are gone for good, and it’s time to figure out what comes next.
It’s the sort of thing we say a lot. Probably too much. Over the last few years, there may not have been a team we said it about more than the Washington Capitals. Even as the team was winning back-to-back Presidents’ Trophies in 2016 and 2017, their constant playoff failures made it clear that something was wrong. After last year’s devastating loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins, we wondered what they would do next and struggled to find a good option. There was talk of trading Alexander Ovechkin, and the Caps didn’t exactly deny that they were thinking about it.
Ovechkin was well into his 30s. Nicklas Backstrom was almost there, and Braden Holtby wasn’t far off. The expensive core that had been so dominant in the regular season but always come up small in the playoffs was old enough that we knew what we were getting. They’d tried, they’ve come close, but they failed. And now some fans figured it might be time to burn it all down. The window was well and truly closed.
Except, of course, that it wasn’t. As the Caps’ summer-long Stanley Cup celebration wears on, it’s fair to wonder if some of us are a little too eager to declare that a team’s window has slammed shut. Maybe they stay open longer than we thought. Maybe they can even be reopened.
And if that’s true, then what other NHL teams might we be wrong about? Today, let’s look at eight teams around the league that, to at least some extent, have received the “your window is closed” treatment from the hockey world. If we were wrong about the Caps, could we be wrong about these teams too?
Why their window seems closed: The Blackhawks may be the best team of the salary cap era, winning three titles in six seasons. But the last of those came in 2015, and they haven’t won a playoff round since. Even worse, the trend in the wrong direction is hard to miss: They dropped a seventh game to the Blues in 2016, were swept in 2017, and didn’t even make the playoffs this year.
What’s worse, the three-year stumble coincides with the matching $10.5-million extensions for Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane kicking in.
Combined with Duncan Keith and (especially) Brent Seabrook, that suggests that the Hawks just have too much money tied up in an aging core, and even Stan Bowman won’t be able to find enough cheap depth to get this team back into the title picture. Even getting back to the playoffs seems like a long road right now.
Why it might not be: As bad as this season was, this is still the same core that won three titles. They’re older, sure, and in today’s NHL that can matter a lot. But the veteran talent is there, and younger pieces like Brandon Saad, Alex DeBrincat and Nick Schmaltz are on hand to support and maybe even eventually supplant the old-timers.
And remember, the 2017-18 season really went off the rails when two-time Cup winner Corey Crawford was out of the lineup. If he’s back and healthy, this team doesn’t look all that different from the one that finished first in the Central in 2017.
Bottom line: The Blackhawks seem like they’ve got a long way to go, especially now that the Jets and Predators have emerged as Central juggernauts. But would anybody be surprised to see them rebound into the playoffs next year? And if so, are we sure we want to count them out as legitimate contenders?
Why their window seems closed: A lot of what we just said about the Blackhawks could apply to the Kings too. They won multiple titles, but the last of those came years ago, and they haven’t won a playoff round since. In fact, in four years since their 2014 championship, the Kings have only won a single playoff game. Their core is getting older and more expensive, including a Toews-like extension for Anze Kopitar. Oh, and there’s at least a chance that Drew Doughty could be leaving in 2019.
Why it might not be: Let’s assume that Doughty sticks around, since all signs point in that direction. His new deal will be expensive, and will tighten the screws on the Kings’ cap even more than it already is. But it will keep the core together, and unlike in Chicago, this team is at least coming off a decent season. They made the playoffs, Kopitar played at an MVP level, Dustin Brown rediscovered his game, and Jonathan Quick still looks like a guy who can steal a series or two.
Bottom line: Another advantage the Kings hold over the Blackhawks: the Pacific Division doesn’t seem all that scary, so a return trip to the playoffs seems like a good bet. Once they’re there, some of that old Quick magic could take them a long way. All the way to another Cup? That seems unlikely, but it seemed that way in Washington too.
In this week's episode of Biscuits, the Vice Sports hockey podcast:
- Alexander Ovechkin and the Capitals head to the final
- Is it OK to not enjoy this Golden Knights story?
- Dave and I make our Cup picks
- Should Jon Cooper be fired?
- Evander Kane sings a monster deal
- Lou Lamoriello joins the Islanders; does this change where Jon Tavares winds up?
- Reader questions and lots more
In this week's episode of Biscuits, the Vice Sports hockey podcast:
- A dramatic deadline day features a blockbuster that happened and a blockbuster that didn't
- Breaking down the Ryan McDonagh deal, and whether anyone can beat the Lightning
- Where do the Senators go now that an Erik Karlsson deal didn't happen?
- The Jets are going for it, and the Blues are doing the complete opposite of that
- Max Pacioretty: Still a Hab
- Jim Benning and the Canucks have an interesting view of rebuilding
- The Sabres don't get much for Evander Kane
- Quite possibly the greatest lottery-protect pick of all-time
- What could the Islanders have received for John Tavares?
- Plus reader questions and lots more...
In this week's episode of Biscuits, the Vice Sports hockey podcast:
- It's an all-deadline edition, as we sort through the big names in play
- Where should the big wingers -- Nash, Kane, Pacioretty -- wind up?
- Does Mike Green head back to Washington, or do the Leafs grab him?
- Will a bigger name like Erik Karlsson be in play?
- Why haven't there been many moves so far?
- Plus thoughts on the Mrazek deal, read questions, and I make a brilliant observation about the Bruins that was outdated within hours.
With five weeks to go until the trade deadline, we’re well into the part of the season where teams need to ask themselves some tough questions. Are we really contenders? How much of the future are we willing to part with? Should we throw in the towel and be sellers? How highly do we value stability in our room? And when is the right time to make our move?
And maybe most importantly: Just how comfortable are we with risk?
We don’t talk about that one much, but it’s a key factor. We already know that most NHL GMs are risk-averse and many would rather not make any trades at all if they thought they could get away with it. But once you’ve decided to make a deal, you’ve got to figure out just how much uncertainty you’re willing to accept.
For some of the players on the market, the risk factor is minimal. If the Leafs decide to move pending UFA James van Riemsdyk, any team acquiring him will know what they’re getting — a guy who’s going to score at a 25- to 35-goal pace, just like he has for the last half-dozen years or so, this one included. Same with someone like Mike Hoffman in Ottawa. Meanwhile, a guy like Mark Letestu may not be as consistent, but he’d come relatively cheap and his contract is easy to swallow, so the risk factor isn’t high there either.
So if you want to play it safe, those are going to be the sort of players you’re calling about. But if you want to swing for the fences, you’re going to have to accept a higher degree of uncertainty. So today, let’s take a look at eight trade targets at this year’s deadline that represent high-risk opportunities.
These are the sort of trades that could earn a GM a Stanley Cup ring — or a pink slip. Who’s feeling lucky?
Players like that don’t hit the trade market very often. That’s especially true when they still have another year left on an extremely team-friendly deal. But with the Canadiens struggling through another disastrous season and Pacioretty slumping for most of the first half, his name is all over the rumour mill. Marc Bergevin’s recent trade record isn’t especially intimidating, and this feels like the perfect opportunity to step in and take advantage of a team that’s in a bad place and might feel forced into selling a prime asset at a discount.
Worst case: Pacioretty’s had a rough season on and off the ice, and the stress of wearing the C in Montreal seems to be wearing on him. It’s been widely assumed that a change of scenery would see him snap back to the consistent 30-goal threat we’re used to seeing. But there’s no guarantee that happens, and it’s possible that whichever team lands him may be getting a guy who needs some time to rediscover his footing. His recent hot streak is reassuring, but it probably also moves up a price tag that should already be high.
Even if he was a bit of a bust this year, you’d still have him under contract for next season. But after that, you figure he’s going to want to get paid after years of representing one of the league’s best values, so this could still be a short-term move with a long-term price tag.
Bottom line: It’s an intriguing opportunity to land a player with a very solid track record. But are you willing to run the risk of being the GM who lost a blockbuster trade to Marc Bergevin?
Puck Soup is a podcast featuring me and Ryan Lambert. We release one free episode each week during the season, plus mailbags and other bonus episodes for Patreon subscribers.
"Biscuits" was the Vice Sports hockey podcast, hosted by DGB and Dave Lozo. It ran for two seasons; the final episode was in July, 2018. You can find the archives below:
