Introducing the “they had him but he never played there” all-stars

With the season just over a month away, it will be time to get back to real content soon. It’s been a fun summer of time-wasting challenges and random rankings, but soon it’s going to be time get serious.

Soon, but not quite yet. So today, we’re going to get to a topic that shows up in a lot of your requests: Superstar players, and the teams they never actually played for. Specifically, we’re looking for players who belonged to a team at some point, be it a few years or a few hours, but never suited up for them. Along the way, we should run into some interesting stories.

But first, a few ground rules™:

- We’re going to be building a 20-man roster out of 12 forwards, six defensemen and two goalies.

- We’re looking for overall star power. Normally this is the part where I give you the whole “only get credit for what a player did on your team” caveat, but… (gestures at entire concept). Full careers on this one.

- Finally, we’re limiting each team to one representative. Call this the Arizona Coyotes rule.

Sound good? Let’s do this. One full roster, full of stars who never played for the teams they were one.

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We’ll start our squad with a Hall-of-Famer and all-time great, who’s also kind enough to be a simple example of what we’re looking for here. Six years before he arrived in Montreal and gave the Habs nearly a decade of Cup-winning goaltending, Ken Dryden was a Bruins third-round pick. Boston held onto him for all of three weeks before trading him to Montreal, and the rest was history. Unlike the Bruins, we’ll give him a chance as our starter.

The second goalie spot has a few worthy candidates. We could go with Tim Thomas, a Nordiques pick who never got a chance there. There’s also Olaf Kolzig, who was technically Maple Leafs property for a few weeks in 2009, or another not-quite-Leaf in Tuukka Rask. Or Mike Richter, a lifelong Ranger who was briefly a member of both the Predators and Oilers due to offseason shenanigans. Evgeni Nabokov was a Red Wing for a few hours before the Islanders sniped him off the waiver wire. The Canucks acquired John Vanbiesbrouck for a few days before the 1993 expansion draft. We could even dip back into very recent history to go with the Blue Jackets’ brief Jonathan Quick era. And the best of the bunch might be Henrik Lundqvist, who signed with the Capitals but was never healthy enough to suit up for them.

All else being equal, I’d go with Lundqvist here. But without giving too much away, I don’t want to use my Capitals slot this early. So instead, let’s go with Hall-of-Famer Eddie Belfour and his brief and forgotten two-day stint with the Nashville Predators in 2002. Yes, really.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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Who was the worst player to ever be traded one-for-one for a future Hall of Famer?

While there hasn’t been a ton of big news over the last few weeks, we have seen a handful of trades. The Hawks made two of them, sending Artem Anisimov to Ottawa for Zack Smith and Henri Jokiharju to Buffalo for Alexander Nylander. And then there was the big one, last week’s Milan Lucic for James Neal swap.

That one led to Bob McKenzie getting a little bit cheeky on Twitter.

I do feel obliged to say this: the Lucic-Neal CGY-EDM trade is one for one. 😜

— Bobby Margarita (@TSNBobMcKenzie) July 19, 2019

That’s a callback to this all-timer about the Taylor Hall deal, but it highlights something neat about the last few weeks of deals: They were all classic one-for-ones.

I’ve always loved the humble one-for-one trade. I can appreciate the occasional nine-player blockbuster as much as the next guy, but there’s just something about the simplicity of one player going each way in a deal. It’s the sports equivalent of buying something with exact change. No draft picks, no prospects, no list of depth guys or fringe minor leaguers to balance out the ledger. Just two players switching teams, and two GMs betting that their new guy will be better than their old one.

The Lucic-for-Neal trade might not stay a one-for-one, thanks to the inclusion of a truly spectacular conditional third-round pick. But for now, it can be included in a category with a rich if uneven history. Crack open the NHL record books, and you’ll find one-for-one trades that include multiple Hall of Famers (Pronger-for-Shanahan, Sawchuk-for-Bucyk), very good players (Middleton-for-Hodge) and current-day stars (Weber-for-Subban). Some of them worked out great for both teams (Jones-for-Johansen). Some of them very much did not (Hall-for-Larsson, Rask-for-Raycroft, Naslund-for-Stojanov).

But today, I want to go in a slightly different direction, with what might seem like a weird question: Who’s the least successful player to ever be traded straight up in a one-for-one deal for a future Hall of Famer?

At first glance, you’d think the list would be a pretty short one. After all, future Hall of Famers tend to be pretty good. You’d figure that if you were going to be traded for one, you’d have to be pretty good too. And usually, yeah, that turns out to be the case. But not always, because this is the NHL. Sometimes circumstances get weird and stuff happens.

So, let’s look at five players who it might surprise you to learn can claim to have been traded one-for-one for a future Hall of Famer. (All trade details are from hockey-reference.com.)

Jim Montgomery

Technically, Guy Carbonneau isn’t a Hall of Famer yet; that will have to wait for the induction ceremony in November. But he’s now officially a future Hall of Famer, so we can use him to build our list. And as it turns out, he offers us two possibilities. Carbonneau was traded twice in his career, and both were underwhelming one-for-one deals. In 1995, he went from St. Louis to Dallas for Paul Broten, who wasn’t a superstar but at least put together a solid career. So instead, let’s use Carbonneau’s other trade, which came in 1994 and saw him dealt from Montreal to St. Louis for 25-year-old sophomore (and Montreal native) Jim Montgomery.

The trade was a big deal in Montreal, where Carbonneau had played 13 seasons, winning three Selkes and two Cups, including one in 1993 as captain. One year after that championship, and just days after the team was eliminated from the playoffs, a Montreal newspaper ran a front-page cover of Carbonneau giving the finger to a photographer at a golf course. The team claimed that the trade had nothing to do with the controversy, although it’s fair to say that not everyone believed them. Either way, Carbonneau was himself stunned by the trade, as were many fans.

In exchange, the Canadiens received a young center who’d been a college star and was coming off a 20-point rookie season. He made the Habs to start the lockout-shortened season, appearing in five games without recording a point. That would spell the end of his career as a Canadien; just two weeks into the season, the Flyers claimed him on waivers, leaving Montreal with nothing to show for trading away their captain.

Montgomery would spend parts of two seasons in Philadelphia and several more in the minors before resurfacing in the NHL with the Sharks and later Stars. In all, from the day he was traded straight up for Carbonneau he’d play just 55 NHL games, scoring three goals and 14 points.

So no, Jim Montgomery didn’t end up being much of an NHL player, despite once being traded for a Hall of Famer. But if the name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s back in the league now, having slightly more success as the head coach of the Dallas Stars.

Yan Golubovsky

Golubovsky was a Russian defenseman who’d been a first-round pick by the Red Wings in 1994. He didn’t debut until 1997, playing a dozen games for the Wings over a one-month stretch before being sent back down. He bounced up and down for three seasons, playing a total of 50 games and scoring one goal while mostly holding down AHL duties.

When he didn’t make the NHL roster out of camp in 2000, the team finally cut bait. And they did it by reacquiring a recent Wing. Igor Larionov had spent five years in Detroit before heading to Florida as a free agent in the 2000 offseason, presumably to center countryman Pavel Bure. That move had been a bust for everyone involved, with Larionov playing poorly, feuding with the coaching and staff and generally making a nuisance of himself. When the Wings came calling and Larionov agreed to waive his no-trade clause, the Panthers jumped at the chance to fold a bad hand, and a Larionov-for-Golubovsky trade was born.

Larionov played three more solid seasons for the Wings, including a 2002 Cup run in which he scored a massive goal. As for Florida, the deal was overshadowed by bigger news, as the Panthers fired GM Bryan Murray and coach Terry Murray on the same day. But they promised their fans that Golubovsky would play for the Panthers one day. He did – six games, to be exact. They’d be the last of his NHL career, as he’d head back to Russia after the season.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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Grab Bag: Disco Lafleurno

In the return of the Friday Grab Bag:
- The NHL refuses to use its own cap recapture rule. Good, because it's terrible.
- I have a solution for the NHL's Fortnite problem
- An obscure NHL bust you've seen a million times without knowing it
- The week's three comedy stars
- And a look back at a time when Montreal stars were the coolest guys in the world

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

A brief history of NHL expansion drafts getting weird

One week from today, the NHL will announce the results of the expansion draft and the Vegas Golden Knights will be born. It’s an exciting time in the NHL, with the first expansion draft since 2000 and first ever held under a salary-cap system.

But while an expansion draft is a novelty for modern NHL fans, that hasn’t always been the case. This league has done an awful lot of expanding since 1967, with some decidedly mixed results. So today, let’s take a moment to look back on the various expansion drafts that came before this one, the players that were chosen, and the oddities that always seem to pop up whenever the NHL decides to welcome new members of the family.

(Much of the information in this post was found trough the indispensable Historical Hockey blog, the HockeyDB database of expansion draft results, and hockey-reference.com.)

1967

We’ll start with the big one. The 1967 expansion draft wasn’t the NHL’s first; the league had added several teams in its earliest days, all with some sort of mechanism to stock the new franchises with players from existing teams. But it was the 1967 process that spelled the end of an era, as the league doubled in size by welcoming six new teams.

As you’d expect, adding that many teams meant that a lot of guys had to be made available. But the league’s 1967 rules were actually slightly more generous to the existing teams than the 2017 draft. Teams could protect 11 skaters and one goaltender, with exemptions for younger players, and could add players to their protected list as the draft went on. (Legend has it that Habs GM Sam Pollock personally crafted the rules to ensure the best possible result for Montreal.)

Still, with so many new rosters to fill, each of the Original Six teams was going to have to cough up a total of 20 players. Think about that the next time the GM of your favourite team moans about losing a fourth-line winger to Vegas.

As with most expansion drafts, the focus was on goaltenders; only six in the entire league were initially protected, so there were plenty of big names to choose from. That included the first-overall pick, Terry Sawchuk, who went from the Maple Leafs to the Kings (although he’d threatened to retire if he was picked), as well as Glenn Hall, who went from Chicago to St. Louis with the third pick. The skaters weren’t quite so notable, although some decent picks like Jean-Paul Parise and Bill Goldsworthy were snagged.

Best player taken: With apologies to Hall and Sawchuk, the draft’s best pick was a younger goalie; the Flyers used the second-overall pick to grab Bernie Parent from the Bruins. He’d make a detour to Toronto and the WHA before rejoining the Flyers in time to win back-to-back Conn Smythe trophies.

Notable oddity: Legendary sniper Bernie Geoffrion was technically available, but all 12 teams formed a gentleman’s agreement that he wouldn’t be taken and forced to finish his career on an expansion squad.

1970

The NHL’s next crack at expansion was a smaller one, as the Sabres and Canucks joined the league. This time, there wasn’t much to choose from, since the Original Six weren’t all that interested in helping out another wave of newcomers and the six 1967 expansion teams were all still reasonably terrible.

Only two players taken in this draft went on to score even 200 points over the remainder of their career. Gerry Meehan had 418 after being taken by Buffalo, while Mike Corrigan had 337 for the Canucks.

Best player taken: It’s probably a tossup between Meehan and Vancouver’s Orland Kurtenbach. Meehan, of course, went on to become the Sabres GM in 1986; he made the trade that brought Dominik Hasek to Buffalo. But the Sabres weren’t the only team to find a future GM in this draft, as the Canucks picked Pat Quinn with the eighth pick.

Notable oddity: The draft order was determined by the same ridiculous roulette wheel that the league infamously used (and then misread) to figure out which of Vancouver or Buffalo would get to draft Gilbert Perreault.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

The five most memorable Game Sevens in conference final history

Well, at least the Senators came through. While the Ducks couldn't stave off elimination in Monday's Game 6 loss to the Predators, the Senators managed to extend their series with the Penguins with Tuesday night's win. That means we'll at least get one Game 7 out of this year's conference finals.

So to celebrate, let's count down the five most memorable conference final Game 7s, dating back to the introduction of the four-round format back in 1975. Here's hoping the Pens and Sens can deliver something that will push for a spot on this list when they meet Thursday night.

No. 5: Devils vs. Senators, 2003

Here's a secret about the 2003 conference final showdown between the Devils and the Senators: It was for the Stanley Cup.

Nobody wanted to say that out loud at the time; it would have been bad form. But the Senators had posted the league's best regular season record, while the Devils had finished fourth overall. With all of the other contenders already eliminated, Ottawa and New Jersey were playing for the right to face the upstart Mighty Ducks in the final. And while Paul Kariya and friends were a great story, nobody gave them much of a chance against either the Senators or Devils.

So this series really did feel like it was for the championship. And the two teams put on a show worthy of those stakes, with the Devils taking a 3-1 series lead before the Senators roared back to force a seventh game thanks to a Chris Phillips overtime winner in Game 6. That set up a deciding game back in Ottawa, and it lived up to the hype. The teams traded goals, Martin Brodeur and Patrick Lalime traded big saves, and we were all tied at 2-2 late in the third.

And then, with overtime looming, it all fell apart for Ottawa thanks to a broken coverage on a harmless-looking rush.

Jeff Friesen's goal held up as the winner, and New Jersey moved on. Those Mighty Ducks turned out to be a tougher opponent than most of us expected, stretching the final to seven games. But the Devils prevailed, capturing their third Cup and leaving Senators fans to agonize over how close they'd come.

>> Read the full post at The Hockey News

When traded picks become superstars

It’s trade-deadline season in the NHL, which means GMs around the league are working the phones in an attempt to make a move. Some of the deals being discussed will come to fruition, while most will never go anywhere. As much as we may rip on these guys for not getting deals done, the truth is that it really is tough to find a fit in today’s NHL.

But there’s one trick that can make closing out a deal a little easier. When in doubt, why not throw in a draft pick to balance the scales?

It makes sense, and most deals that get done these days have at least a pick or two thrown in somewhere. But every now and then, those picks can come back to haunt you, as we’ll see in these 10 trades that didn’t seem like big deals at the time, but ended up indirectly involving a future superstar.

For this list, we’re not worried about cases where a team traded up on the draft floor to target a specific player. We’re looking at situations where a team acquired a pick months or even years in advance, only to have an eventual star fall into their lap.

So tread carefully, NHL GMs — you never know when that pick you throw in to make a deal work will come back to haunt you.

1. THE TRADE: On Nov. 4, 1983, the Winnipeg Jets acquire defenceman Robert Picard from the Montreal Canadiens in exchange for a third round pick at the 1984 draft

The rationale: The Jets were trying to build a roster that could do something other than lose in the first round of the playoffs every year, and needed some depth on the blueline. Picard was a solid-enough player, and a third-round pick seemed like a fair price.

But the pick turned into: On draft day, the Canadiens traded up to get picks in the first and second round, which they used on Shane Corson and Stephane Richer. But the deal cost them multiple picks as well as Rick Wamsley, so they needed to replenish their goaltending depth.

They used the Jets' third-round pick to do it, grabbing a skinny kid from the QMJHL named Patrick Roy.

The epilogue: Picard was fine in two seasons as a Jet before being dealt to the Nordiques for Mario Marois.

2. THE TRADE: On the eve of the 1978-79 season opener, the Los Angeles Kings trade their first-round pick in the 1979 draft to the Boston Bruins for goalie Ron Grahame

The rationale: The Kings needed a goaltender after Rogie Vachon had signed with Detroit in free agency. Vachon had been an all-star and he'd appeared in 70 games the year before, so his departure left a huge void. With backup Gary Simmons also out of the picture, the Kings needed somebody to fill the starter's job, and apparently didn't trust prospect Mario Lessard to handle the load.

They turned to the Bruins and Grahame, who'd just put up an excellent half-season and, at 28 years old, seemed like a guy who could be their starter for years to come.

But the pick turned into: The pick ended up being eighth overall in what's now viewed as perhaps the greatest draft ever, and the Bruins used it to pick Ray Bourque.

The epilogue: As it turns out, the Kings didn't even need a goalie after all; Lessard played well enough to beat out Grahame for the starter's job, and held it for four years. Just over two years after trading a first round pick for him, the Kings sent Grahame to the Nordiques for cash in 1980.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

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Five forgotten expansion draft picks

Now that the Vegas Golden Knights have a name, a logo, and a future head coach, everyone is turning their attention to June's expansion draft. Who will the Knights end up with? Matt Murray? Jakob Silfverberg? Trevor van Riemsdyk? Maybe even an established veteran who waives a no-movement clause, like Dion Phaneuf or Rick Nash?

Those are all reasonably big names, and if the Golden Knights wound up picking any of them, you'd think it would make for a memorable moment.

Then again, maybe not. You see, sometimes NHL expansion teams end up taking big name players, and everyone just kind of forgets about it. That's because there's no guarantee that any player taken by an expansion team will ever actually play for that expansion team.

So today, let's take a look back at five fairly big names that have been called at expansion drafts of the past, and how they managed to avoid ever actually suiting up for the fledgling franchises that chose them.

Tim Kerr, 1991

Early NHL expansion drafts of the 60s and 70s were fairly standard. A handful of good players were picked, including names like Terry Sawchuk, Glenn Hall and Bernie Parent. But for the most part, the established teams didn't offer much in the way of talent, and the expansion franchises patched together a team with whatever they could find. That's why most of the early expansion teams were awful.

But by the time the second wave of expansion had hit in the 1990s, the new teams were willing to get a little more creative. Oh, they'd still be awful. But they realized that just because they drafted a player didn't mean they had to keep him, and it became common to see trades worked out as soon as the expansion draft was over (and sometimes even sooner).

Take the 1991 draft, for example. That was the weird expansion/dispersal hybrid that featured the San Jose Sharks and the Minnesota North Stars, which we covered in some depth over the summer. The most famous weird pick from that draft was the very last one, in which the North Stars picked quasi-retired Hall of Famer Guy Lafleur because they didn't want any Quebec Nordiques and the rules wouldn't allow them to pass. But another well-known sniper was also taken that day.

That would be Tim Kerr, a four-time 50-goal scorer for the Flyers who'd been slowed down by injuries. By 1991, he hadn't put together a full season in four years. But he was still scoring at well over a point-per-game pace when he did play, and seemed like the sort of guy who could be a good gamble for a contender.

The Sharks weren't a contender, but the Rangers were. And so the Sharks grabbed Kerr off of the Flyer's unprotected list, and then immediately flipped him to the Rangers in exchange for Brian Mullen. It was a smart deal for San Jose; Mullen ended up being their second-leading scorer in their debut season. It worked out worse for the Rangers, as Kerr struggled through another injury-shortened year before being dealt to Hartford.

>> Read the full post at The Hockey News

Phil Kessel is not alone

Sidney Crosby captured his first Conn Smythe on Sunday night, earning the nod from media voters in a tough field that hadn’t produced a clear cut favorite. Plenty of fans thought the voters got it right. But others were disappointed, with many of those feeling the honor should have gone to Phil Kessel.

It’s not hard to see why. Kessel is a divisive player (especially among fans of his former teams), but when viewed from a certain angle he makes for a fantastic story. And more importantly, he was the Penguins leading scorer in the playoffs, finishing three points up on Crosby. And that made his Conn Smythe loss to Crosby an unusual one, at least in terms of recent NHL history.

But simply leading a team in scoring is no guarantee of Conn Smythe glory, nor should it be, and the award has a long history of debatable decisions. So today, let’s look back at some of the other cases in NHL history in which a Cup winner’s leading scorer was snubbed by the voters. We’ll ignore the (many) times where a leading scorer was passed over for a defenseman or goaltender, since that tends to be an apples and oranges case. Instead, we’ll focus on cases that fit the Kessel/Crosby pattern, where a team’s leading scorer was passed over for another forward.

As we’ll find out, it turns out that Kessel and Crosby are in good company. Here are five forwards who skated away with the Conn Smythe despite finishing well back of one or more teammates in the scoring race.

1967: Toronto Maple Leafs

The leading scorer was: Jim Pappin, who racked up 15 points in 12 games. Linemates Pete Stemkowski and Bob Pulford also cracked double digits, as did future Hall of Famer Frank Mahovlich.

But the Conn Smythe went to: Dave Keon, who finished tied for fifth on the team with eight points.

What were they thinking?: This was only the third time the Conn Smythe had been awarded, so a traditional set of criteria hadn’t been established yet. But it’s not hard to see what the voters were going for here: Keon was the Maple Leafs best player, a four-time all-star who’d just finished leading the team in regular season scoring. He was also one of the game’s best two-way centers, so the lack of eye-popping offensive totals was easy enough to look past. His role against the Black Hawks and Canadiens was to shut down their best players, and he delivered.

1979: Montreal Canadiens

The leading scorer was: Guy Lafleur, who followed up a 129-point season with 23 more in the playoffs, leaving him tied with teammate Jacques Lemaire for the league lead.

But the Conn Smythe went to: Don Cherry, for forgetting how many players were allowed on the ice at one time.

OK, fine, it was Bob Gainey, who had 16 points.

What were they thinking?: Gainey was the best defensive forward of his era, having just finished the second of four consecutive Selke-winning campaigns. (Legend even has it that the award was created with Gainey in mind.)

And while his playoff numbers may not have come close to Lafleur’s, they were well ahead of his typical regular season output, meaning voters were seeing him at his best at both ends of the ice. It may also be worth noting that Lafleur had already won the Conn Smythe once before, in 1977, and at that point no forward had ever won the honor multiple times.

>> Read the full post at The Hockey News

Five weird facts about the day the Sharks were born

The San Jose Sharks are in the Stanley Cup final for the first time in franchise history, trailing their series with the Penguins 1-0 heading into Wednesday’s Game 2 in Pittsburgh. It’s been a long road for the Sharks to get here, one that’s seen plenty of regular season success but also a big helping of postseason heartbreak along the way.

It’s also a road that had one of the strangest starts in the history of the NHL. Most fans know that the Sharks entered the league as an expansion team in 1991. But what they may not remember is how it happened. Unlike every franchise that’s joined the league since, the Sharks weren’t born through a standard expansion draft process. Instead, they were part of weird combination expansion and dispersal draft with the North Stars, one that saw them stock their roster with Minnesota players before both teams took turns adding talent from the rest of the league.

It was a strange sight, one that we’ll almost certainly never see again. So today, with the Sharks four wins away from hockey’s ultimate prize, let’s remember where they came from with a look back at five weird facts about the day the San Jose Sharks were born.

1. It all starts with the Gunds

The original plan for bringing an NHL team to the Bay Area in the early 90s didn’t involve expansion at all. Instead, it would have seen the North Stars pick up and move to California. That was the proposal of the Stars’ owners, George and Gordon Gund, who claimed to be losing money in Minnesota. But the NHL refused to approve a move, and eventually the two sides agreed on a compromise. The Gunds would sell the North Stars, which they did in 1990, and the league would turn around and give them an expansion team in San Jose.

As part of the deal, the Gunds were granted the right to stock their new team with players from their old one. That agreement was a controversial one, and new North Stars owner Norm Green eventually insisted on reworking the original deal. The final version called for the North Stars to be allowed to protect 14 skaters and two goalies, at which point the Sharks could start plucking players away. Once that was done, the two teams immediately moved on to a more traditional expansion draft format, one that saw both teams picking players from the rest of the league, even though one of them wasn’t actually an expansion team at all.

To make things ever weirder, the North Stars were the defending conference champions at the time, thanks to a Cinderella run through the playoffs that had ended just days earlier. That run included upsets over the league two best regular season teams, Chicago and St. Louis, and the defending Stanley Cup champions, Edmonton. The run finally ended with a loss in the 1991 final to the Pittsburgh Penguins. (Feel free to confuse people by referring to this year’s final as a rematch.)

The 1991 Stanley Cup final ended on May 25, 1991. Five days later, one of the teams from that series was stocking its roster in an expansion draft. The early-90s NHL was a fascinating place.

2. There’s a California Golden Seals and Cleveland Barons connection here

Mention the Golden Seals to most hockey fans, and they’ll think of two things: White skates, and a comical level of ineptitude. The Seals entered the league (alongside the Penguins) as part of the 1967 expansion, but didn’t last long. They left California in 1976, after their minority owners made the case for moving the team to Cleveland to become the Barons. Those minority owners were George and Gordon Gund, and they quickly became the team’s majority owners. But the move only prolonged the inevitable, and by 1978 the Barons were on life support.

That offseason, the Barons essentially folded, with their roster being absorbed by the North Stars. The Gunds assumed ownership of the new franchise, and kept it until the 1991 move to San Jose.

So yes, Sharks fans – to this day, your team technically has some Cleveland sports DNA. That might help explain all the heartbreak.

>> Read the full post at The Hockey News

Grab Bag: I was saying "Booo-ruce"

In this week's Friday Grab Bag:
- The NHL needs to stop making terrible rule changes that won't fix the scoring problem
- An obscure player is used as a pawn in one of the great shady trades of all-time
- Comedy stars, in which Ryan Kesler defrauds someone other than the Ducks' cap consultant
- Why the NHL all-star game should be like Survivor
- And a YouTube breakdown of the most awkward interview in the career of Gary Bruce Bettman. Wait, "Bruce"?

>> Read the full post on ESPN.com

A history of trading up to the #1 overall pick

Last week, ESPN’s Craig Custance wrote an article that asked a fun hypothetical question: How much would it cost to trade up to the no. 1 pick in this year’s draft?

The short answer: a ton. In fact, probably so much that a deal would be all-but-impossible to pull off. After all, this isn’t just any draft — this is the Connor McDavid draft, the one in which the team that holds the first pick will end up drafting a sure-thing franchise player who’s been compared to Sidney Crosby.

But midway through the article came a fascinating reveal: Sabres GM Tim Murray has already spent some time thinking about the question. And he thinks he might be able to get it done.

And the more I think about it, the more I suspect he’s right. Let’s assume that the Sabres do finish last — sorry, Coyotes fans — but then lose the lottery. They’d still have the second overall pick. That’s Jack Eichel’s spot, and most scouts consider him almost-but-not-quite in McDavid’s ballpark. Could Murray use that second overall pick, plus a package of other picks and prospects — of which the Sabres have an impressive stockpile — to convince the lucky lottery winner to trade down one spot?

Remember, the Sabres have been pretty blatant about making their whole season about McDavid, even taking the unusual step of hosting his junior team for a game. They did all of that knowing the best odds they could get in the lottery were just 20 percent. Yet they seemed awfully confident. Could that be because Murray has had a plan B all along?

OK, probably not. But it sure is fun to think about. So let’s take a look back through the history books at the other times a team has traded the first pick in the NHL draft. It’s relatively rare; according to ProSportsTransactions.com, there are only a handful of cases when the first pick has been traded before the draft.¹

Could Murray pull it off? Let’s see if there’s anything he can learn from the GMs who’ve pulled the trigger.

1971

The trade: The California Golden Seals trade their 1971 first-rounder (no. 1) and Francois Lacombe to the Canadiens for their 1970 first-rounder (no. 10) and Ernie Hicke.

Player taken: Guy Lafleur

The background: This was in the early days of the NHL draft, before anyone had really figured out what to do and the whole thing made absolutely no sense. Montreal GM Sam Pollock took advantage of that confusion to continually fleece other teams out of first-rounders, which is what happened here; this trade actually went down more than a year before the 1971 draft. Pollock knew there was a potential franchise player in Lafleur available in 1971, while the Golden Seals … well, the Golden Seals didn’t know what they were doing.

The lesson for Murray: This deal only happened because it was made in the draft’s infancy, so it’s going to help if you can build a time machine. Can Murray build a time machine? (I honestly think there’s a roughly 20 percent chance that Murray could build a time machine.)

1975

The trade: The Flyers trade Bill Clement, Don McLean and the no. 18 pick to the Capitals for the no. 1 selection.

Player taken: Mel Bridgman

The background: That package doesn’t sound like much to give up for the first overall pick, and that sort of offer this year would probably get you laughed out of the room. But the 1975 draft was awful, ranking among the weakest ever. It didn’t produce a single Hall of Famer, and only one player went on to score 1,000 career points — and that guy, Dave Taylor, was taken in the 15th round. Bridgman was a decent player, the best taken in the first round, but that’s about it.

The lesson for Murray: Drive the price down by convincing everyone this is a terrible draft. Look, Tim, we never said this was going to be easy.

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The NHL draft was a beautiful mess in the 1970s

NHL fans love draft weekend. It marks the unofficial start of the offseason, and it serves as a period of renewal as a new rookie class is welcomed while teams wheel and deal to begin the long process of remaking their rosters.

But while the results are inherently unpredictable, the draft itself features a certain sense of familiarity. The league has been holding these things for over half a century, and by now we all know what to expect. We get a bust here, a late-round sleeper there, a trade or two if we’re lucky, and everyone is on a flight home by Saturday night. There’s a rhythm to the whole production that’s become ingrained in its DNA.

It wasn’t always that way. The NHL draft used to be chaos.

Specifically, the draft was chaos for pretty much all of the 1970s. It was still vaguely similar to what we know today, just familiar enough to be recognizable, but none of it made any sense.

If you’re not old enough to remember what went on — or if, like most people, you figured it was just better to pretend the whole decade never happened — then it’s worth your while to take a look back at the madness. Let’s just say it was an odd time to be a hockey fan.

Draft oddity no. 1: It was still relatively new

The first NHL draft wasn’t held until 1963; up until then, amateur players had been allocated exclusively based on club sponsorships and the use of C forms to lock up prospects. Those earliest drafts were quick and relatively unimportant affairs, with as few as 11 players taken across the league and teams frequently passing on their picks.

By the 1970s, the draft had come to more closely resemble what we’re used to today. But it was still fairly new and teams were still figuring out how to approach it. Some franchises spent heavily on amateur scouting; others all but ignored it. Some drafted based on what they needed right then; others looked long term. And some teams viewed their draft picks as critical assets, while others were more than willing to use them as cheap trade bait for acquiring immediate help.

That last factor turned out to be especially important, because it gave a smart GM an opportunity to take advantage of a market inefficiency. More on that in a minute.

Draft oddity no. 2: There was another league out there

The rival World Hockey Association had appeared in 1972 and would last until 1979, creating the odd dynamic of two professional leagues drafting from the same pool of players. That meant that NHL and WHA teams could end up drafting the same players, and teams ran the risk of picking guys who’d report to the rival league instead.

That was especially rough on the WHA, which typically saw most of its first-round talent choose to head to the higher profile NHL. But it complicated things for NHL teams, too, and that uncertainty led to some of the unusual behavior we’ll see in the next few sections. It also created a bizarre situation in which the two leagues would occasionally try to keep their drafts secret, to prevent the other side from knowing who’d been taken where.

Maybe more importantly, the WHA also helped create a landscape where the NHL felt the need to continue adding teams to keep up. That left the league with an eclectic mix of long-established franchises and brand-new markets. There were more front-office jobs than ever before. And not everyone knew what they were doing.

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