A brief history of the Sam Pollock Trophy, a fake award for NHL Trade of the Year

We’re into August, well and truly the dead zone of the NHL offseason. While we occasionally do see a major roster move or two this late into the summer, it’s just as often the case that all the big headlines are done until we get close to camp.

So if the 2024 offseason is all but over, what was your favorite blockbuster? Was it the Mitch Marner trade that finally blew up the Leafs’ underachieving core? Or maybe big moves involving Martin Necas or Nik Ehlers? Are you going with one of those culture-changing shakeups that the Rangers promised? Or maybe it was when the Ducks finally pulled the trigger on the long-rumored Trevor Zegras deal.

Oh… right.

None of those deals have happened. At least not yet, and in some cases, pretty clearly not anytime soon. The summer hasn’t been a total letdown, with some legitimately big moves involving names like Jacob Markstrom, Mikhail Sergachev, Linus Ullmark and Pierre-Luc Dubois. But overall, if you’re a fan the dying art of the hockey blockbuster, the summer’s been a bit of a letdown.

This sounds like a good excuse to make up another award.

 

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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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What’s the most important trade in NHL history that didn’t happen?

Last​ week, we had​ some​ fun​ with​ a few​ of​ the contenders​ for the title​ of second most​ important​ trade ever made.​​ These weren’t just the biggest trades in terms of the talent involved on the impact on individual teams – they were the deals that actually changed the course of NHL history.

But to paraphrase the old cliché, sometimes the most important trades are the ones you don’t make. So what about those? What are the most important trades in NHL history that didn’t happen?

Now clearly, we could get a little silly here. Wayne Gretzky for Mario Lemieux was a huge trade that wasn’t made. Same with Rocket Richard for Gordie Howe, or Sidney Crosby for Alexander Ovechkin. Any one of those deals would have changed the course of history, but none of them happened. There’s also no evidence that any of them were ever even discussed, so it feels ridiculous to spend any time thinking about them.

But there have been other blockbuster non-trades that really did come close to happening, or at least seemed that way at the time. So today, let’s look at eight deals that didn’t happen, but that we know were at least considered. I’ll give you a legitimate source for the trade and you let me speculate wildly about the rest. Do we have a deal?

If so, we’re one step ahead of these teams. But a few of them at least came close. Here are eight contenders for the most important NHL trade that didn’t happen.

1992: Eric Lindros to the Rangers

The trade: The Quebec Nordiques send Lindros to New York in exchange for cash, draft picks and a package of players including names like Tony Amonte, Alexei Kovalev, Sergei Nemchinov, James Patrick and John Vanbiesbrouck.

Unlike many trades-that-weren’t, this one was actually a done deal. The problem is that it wasn’t the only Lindros trade the Nordiques made that day.

The source: There’s some question over the specific names involved in the deal; for example, Mike Richter occasionally shows up instead of Vanbiesbrouck. But we know the Rangers and Nordiques had a deal of some sort, because it was at the center of the arbitration case that transfixed the hockey world during that 1992 offseason.

Why it didn’t happen: Blame Larry Bertuzzi. The NHL arbitrator ruled that the Nordiques had made their deal with the Flyers first and would have to abide by it.

But what if it did?: If Bertuzzi sends Lindros to New York – which is what most observers had expected at the time – then we change the next decade or more of history for at least three franchises. The Flyers don’t get Lindros, but they also don’t dismantle their team to do it, and they hold onto the rights to Peter Forsberg. The Rangers land the biggest prospect in NHL history, but might not have enough depth left over to win the Stanley Cup in 1994. And without Forsberg turning into one of the best two-way centers ever, the Nordiques/Avalanche might not win it all in 1996 and 2001.

As for Lindros himself, he’d have had the chance to start his career while playing behind and learning from the player he was most often compared to, Mark Messier. And maybe he avoids all the off-ice battles that defined his time in Philadelphia.

1962: Frank Mahovlich to Chicago

The trade: Maybe “trade” isn’t the right word. This one was a sale. Specifically, the deal would have seen the Maple Leafs send Mahovlich to the ‘Hawks in exchange for $1 million.

The source: This one was splashed all over the front page of sports sections around North America in the days after the deal, given that the two teams had agreed on it and word leaked out to reporters. The story has since been repeated often; here’s a detailed look back from NHL.com.

Why it didn’t happen: The deal was struck between Leafs co-owner Harold Ballard and ‘Hawks owner James Norris during a late-night meeting in which they were, in the words of immortal Toronto sportswriter Milt Dunnell, “fortified by the gargle.” In other words, they were both hammered, and that led to some second thoughts on the Leafs side, with Stafford Smythe claiming that “we never rolled a drunk yet and we don’t have to start now.”

That noble high-road stance lasted for all of a few days, at which point the Leafs realized that there was a million dollars on the line. They tried to rekindle the deal, but by that point Norris’ brother Bruce had talked him out of it.

But what if it did?: Mahovlich and Bobby Hull were the two best left wingers of the era, and this trade would have put them both on the same team. If the ‘Hawks didn’t go bankrupt from the payout, they almost certainly would have challenged for another Cup or two over the decade to come. And the Leafs may not have won the three more Cups they’d capture with Mahovlich, including that famous 1967 win.

But the trade’s impact would have been even bigger, not just in the NHL but throughout the sports world. The $1 million price tag wasn’t far off from what some teams made in ticket sales in a year, and would have been unprecedented for a single player – as Stan Fischler put it a few years ago, imagine Sidney Crosby being sold for $95 million today. The sale would have redefined how professional athletes were viewed, and would’ve probably made it much tougher for owners to hold down salaries on what would now be million-dollar assets.

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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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When teams trade away top-five picks

The​ Ottawa Senators are coming​ off​ one​ of​ the​ worst​ stretches in​ recent pro sports​ memory, including an​ offseason​ that brought one​​ negative story after another. At this point, you’d like to think that they’ve hit rock bottom. But that might not be true, because there’s a nightmare scenario looming.

It goes something like this: The Senators have the kind of season everyone seems to think they will, finishing at or near the bottom of the league. That earns them one of the top picks in the Jack Hughes draft. But they’ve already traded that pick to Colorado in last year’s Matt Duchene deal, so they get to cap off their season by watching the Avalanche draft a potential franchise player instead.

It would be an undeniably awful way to end a miserable season, and it makes a rebuild a much tougher sell to an exhausted fan base. After all, how do you squeeze any optimism out of a losing season if you don’t even have your own first-round pick to look forward to?

If it’s any comfort, the situation the Senators could be facing isn’t unheard of in recent NHL history, although it is relatively rare. In the last 35 years, eight teams have traded away a future first-round pick, only to suffer through a season that placed that choice in the top five of the draft. (To be clear, we’re not counting teams that traded away a pick they already knew would be a top-five; no trade deadline moves or draft floor wheeling and dealing here. We’re looking for teams that traded their pick in the previous calendar year or earlier, meaning that like Ottawa, they didn’t know their pick would be so high when they moved it.)

The Senators will be hoping not to expand that club to nine. But if they do, a look back at those previous cases might give us a sense of what to expect.

A word about arbitrary endpoints

But first: Wait, why are we going back 35 years?

It’s admittedly a bit of a weird place for a cutoff. But when it comes to teams trading away top five picks, there’s actually an interesting reason to draw the line right around 1983.

In the 35 years since, the scenario plays out just those eight times (one of which probably shouldn’t even count, as we’ll see). But from 1980 through 1983, it happened ten times in just four years. That’s kind of crazy, and the list includes the picks used on future Hall of Famers like Denis Savard, Larry Murphy and Pat LaFontaine, not to mention three out of four first overall picks.

What happened? That’s probably a topic for a bigger piece, but we can call it the Sam Pollock influence. Pollock, the legendary Canadiens GM who built the last great Habs dynasty in the 70s, was constantly trading veterans for future draft picks that he turned into stars like Guy Lafleur and Larry Robinson. It was his signature move, and it worked so well that you wondered why other GMs weren’t catching on. They eventually did, and you can pretty much divide the history of trading for future draft picks into three distinct eras: The Pollock era, spanning the late 60s to late 70s, in which he was the undisputed king of the move; 1980 through 1983, in which a few other GMs caught on and started pulling off that kind of deal; and 1984 through to today, in which everyone smartened up and realized that trading a future first-round pick is a dangerous move and the deals became an endangered species.

Endangered, but not extinct, as Senator fans are well aware. So today, let’s draw that line at 1983 and look back at the eight times since then that a team has traded away what turned out to be a top-five pick in advance. It’s a club that Ottawa’s front office is really hoping it isn’t about to join, although as we’ll see, sometimes the results are more disastrous than others.

Pierre Larouche (L). (Photo by Denis Brodeur/NHLI via Getty Images)

1984 – Montreal and Hartford

The circumstances: We have to go way back to December of 1981 for the actual trade here. Back then, the Habs and Whalers had only been division rivals for a few months. Hartford had failed to win a playoff game in two seasons since arriving in the WHA merger, and on December 20, they lost 8-2 to the Sabres to fall to 7-16-9 on the year, dead last in the division. New Whalers’ GM Larry Pleau figured they could use some help.

The trade: The Whalers and Canadiens hooked up on a Pollock-style trade that saw Pierre Larouche head to Hartford. Larouche had just turned 26, was a year removed from a 91-point season, and had 21 points through 22 games that season, so he was a decent pickup. He did fine in Hartford for a few years before leaving as a free agent.

But the rest of the deal was unusual, with the teams swapping a total of five picks – all of them coming in 1984 and 1985.

The pick: The two teams exchanged first-rounders in 1984, three years down the line. By then, the Canadiens weren’t very good, finishing with just 75 points. But the Whalers were even worse, and their pick ended up being fifth overall. The Canadiens used it to take defenceman Petr Svoboda.

The aftermath: Svoboda was a decent player. But the Whalers used Montreal’s pick to take Sylvain Cote, who was basically the same guy, so we can call this one even. If you’re a Senators fan looking for assurance that these deals can work out OK, this one helps.

That said, the deal could have been a history-altering debacle for Hartford. The top prospect in that 1984 draft was a French kid who turned out to be pretty good, and it’s safe to assume Montreal had him in mind when they made the deal way back in 1981. If the Whalers had been even worse than they were, this could have been the trade that put Mario Lemieux in Montreal.

1987 – Bruins and Canucks

The circumstances: By the 1986 offseason, the Canucks hadn’t won a playoff round since their surprise trip to the 1982 final, and were getting tired of being also-rans to Wayne Gretzky and the Oilers. So they decided to trade their 1987 first to the Bruins for somebody who could make an impact right away.

The trade: In June 1986, the Canucks landed two-time 100-point center Barry Pederson from Boston in exchange for their 1987 first rounder, plus a young winger who’d been kind of a disappointment through three seasons.

The pick: Thanks in parts to Pederson, the Canucks actually improved in 1986-87. But so did a few of the league’s other bottom-feeders, and Vancouver’s pick ended up being third overall. The Bruins used it to take defenseman Glen Wesley.

The aftermath: Wesley was a good player, and played in the 1989 all-star game. He’d spend seven years in Boston, many of them alongside Ray Bourque, and was eventually traded to Hartford for a stunning haul of three first-round picks, all of which ended up in the top ten.

Still, it could have been worse. The Canucks finished the season with three straight wins; take a few of those away, and the Bruins could have been using a top-two pick on Pierre Turgeon or Brendan Shanahan.

So even though Pederson didn’t stick around very long in Vancouver, trading away the pick to get him wasn’t a total disaster. Well, not on its own. As every Canuck and Bruin fan well knows, that disappointing young winger was a kid named Cam Neely. He exploded in Boston, quickly turning the Wesley pick into an afterthought and making this one of the worst trades of all time.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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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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.

>> Read the full post on Grantland