Remembering 10 draft picks that toured the league before they were finally used

The 25th overall pick in this year’s draft has been on a bit of a journey.

The story starts at last year’s deadline. The pick originally belonged to the Lightning, but they traded it to the Kraken in a deal for Oliver Bjorkstrand and Yanni Gourde. The pick stayed with the Kraken until this weekend, when they shipped it to Florida for Mackie Samoskevich. We didn’t realize it at the time, but the Panthers had something even bigger in mind, flipping the pick to Ottawa few hours later in the Brady Tkachuk blockbuster. Now we wait to see if Ottawa uses the pick, or moves it again for immediate help.

Not a bad story for one pick. And I’ll be honest, I kind of love when this happens. Some picks have lived a full life before they’re ever actually used to draft a player. I remember as a kid being fascinated that the biggest trade of 1992 – the Eric Lindros blockbuster – and the biggest of 1994 – Mats Sundin for Wendel Clark – both involved the same pick, one that started off in Philadelphia before heading to Quebec, then Toronto, and ultimately on to Washington (where it was used on Nolan Baumgartner, who played just 143 NHL games).

Today, let’s go back through the cap era and see if we can find some picks that have stories to tell. We’ll set the bar high, looking for picks that changed hands at least four times. We’ll rely on the invaluable Pro Sports Transactions database, and see where this takes us.

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Your lottery team knows where their pick is now. Here’s why they should trade it

Last night saw the hockey world settle in to watch the NHL draft lottery, an annual event in which a collection of ping pong balls reward whichever franchise and its fans are found to be the most noble and pure of heart.

So now we know the NHL’s order for this June’s draft, pending any trades. And it really feels like we’re only saying that last part to be polite. It’s exceedingly rare to see a team trade a pick in the first half of the first round, at least once the lottery has come and gone and the pick order is locked in. And that’s especially true if you ignore trades where teams move up or down a few spots, like the Flyers moving up to 12th last year in a minor draft floor deal with the Penguins. As far as anything bigger, we might see a move every year or two, like last year’s Noah Dobson trade, or the Senators getting Alex DeBrincat in 2022. But it’s rare.

And that's a shame, because every lottery team should be open to trading their pick. Yes, all of them.

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Every first-round pick from this year’s draft that's changed hands, ranked by regret

The first round of this year’s draft is going to take some work to keep track of. Last week’s deadline saw three trades involving first-rounders in this year’s draft alone. That brings the total number of picks that have changed hands from just that round to an even dozen, potentially, although some will depend on conditions.

Of course, not all of the teams involved in those moves would make them over again. So today, let’s get you caught up on which picks have moved while also turning this into a ranking of regret. We’ll go through all 12 picks, ranked from the ones whose former teams have no regrets at all to those where a team might like a do-over.

We’ll start with the least-regrettable of them all, which turns out not to be a very tough choice…

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Should this team make a big deadline deal? (Spoiler: Yes, but they probably won't)

It’s trade deadline week. Should your favorite team do something big? Yes. Will they? Probably not.

That’s life in the NHL, a results-oriented league where the outcome is all that matters unless you’re a GM, in which case you’re allowed to mumble about your job being hard and everyone is supposed to feel sorry for you. These guys have only had four months to figure this stuff out since the season started, including two weeks off during the Olympics. Be reasonable.

Or don’t. Today, we’re going to give that option a try. We’ll pick a team and lay out the honest and yes, reasonable view for why they should play it safe and avoid any truly major moves. And then we’ll try to make the case for why they should break the mold and actually take a big swing.

We tried this last year, with all 32 teams. This year, we’re going to cut that list down. Some teams are obvious sellers who shouldn’t any convincing. Others will obviously buy. By my count, there are at least five scenarios that could see a team on the fence about a blockbuster.

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I want your trade proposals (involving things that cannot be traded)

We all love a good “Who says no?” trade column. Readers send in their proposals, and writers figure out which ones makes sense, and which teams would or wouldn’t be interested. It’s a great gimmick, which is why you see it show up so often.

Let’s try it with a twist. I’m asking you for your trade proposals involving anything that teams aren’t actually allowed to trade. That is, I don’t want to hear about players or picks or signing rights or retained salary. Instead, I want you to hit me with everything else – coaches, front offices, mascots, media, anthem singers, you name it.

Get creative, come up with a trade you think would work for both teams, and send it in. Then I’ll take those ideas and… actually, I don’t know. This probably won’t work. But it would be fun if it did, so no harm in trying.

One tip: Keep your trade offers small and specific. One team's coach for another's GM would work way better than something involving vague concepts like "Team A trades their fans to Team B for low taxes".

Update: OK seriously stop sending proposals that involve tax rates.

Email your trade proposals to dgbmailbag@gmail.com and let’s see where this goes.

Your favorite GM vs. himself: The roster he traded for against the one he traded away

Your favorite GM probably has his hands full this week, so let’s do him a favor and put him in a position where he can’t lose. Specifically, let’s put him in a contest against… himself.

Yeah, this is going to get weird, but stick with it. Today’s post will be all about one question: Who’d win, a starting six made up of the players a GM has acquired in his career, or one of players he’s traded away?

But first, a few ground rules™:

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Remembering the best seasons by a player who was traded midway through

With just one week left before the deadline, let’s kill some time on a Friday with a trade-themed question.

What are the best statistical seasons a player has ever had while being dealt during that same season?

It’s a tricker question than you might think. We’re used to seeing big names get moved at the deadline, but those stars aren’t typically having career years. After all, a player in the midst of a monster season wouldn’t typically be available – for all the talk this time of year about selling high, teams rarely seem to do that.

So today’s post will be a mix of familiar names you might expect, and a few you might not. And of course, any talk of the best statistical season hinges on which stat you’re looking at. Let’s start with the big one.

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Ranking 25 of the NHL's biggest blockbuster trades from the last 25 years

Happy new year. How did you enjoy the first quarter-century of the 2000s?

That question probably makes you either feel old (because there’s no way it’s been that long) or young (because you haven’t even been around that whole time). I’m solidly in the first camp, and that’s why I’m going to distract myself from my feelings by talking about trades.

Today’s topic: Let’s rank 25 of the biggest trades of the last 25 years. Specifically, we’re going to pick the single biggest trade of each calendar year from 2000 through 2024, then rank those from least to most important. Admittedly, “biggest” and “most important” are pretty vague criteria with tons of room for subjectivity, but that’s the way we like it.

To give you an idea of how much time we have to work through, the very first NHL trade of the 2000s involved Stephane Richer. Yes, the guy who used to score 50 goals for the Canadiens back in the 80s. He was apparently a St. Louis Blue for a minute way back when. You learn something new everyday, even when you are extremely old.

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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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Remembering five big trades between eventual Stanley Cup finalists

I’m starting to get the sinking feeling that this season may come and go without one of my favorite types of trades.

That would be a deal between two teams that end up facing each other in the next Stanley Cup final, one where the player (or players) involved get to try to cost their former team a championship. There’s still hope – maybe Anthony Mantha gets a shot at the Capitals, or Sam Lafferty gets some payback against the Maple Leafs, or Sean Walker crosses path with the Flyers. But it doesn’t seem like Reilly Smith is going to get a crack at the Knights or that we’ll see Tyler Toffoli haunting the Devils, and it looks like we’ll have to wait until next year for the inevitable Bowen Byram/Casey Mittelstadt Stanley Cup showdown.

It's a shame. But it’s not unusual, because as you’d probably expect, big trades between eventual finalists are rare. Rare, but not unheard of. So today, let’s Remember Some Trades with a countdown of a five times that a trade between two teams ended up paying off in a Stanley Cup final matchup months down the line.

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Which team can build the best roster of stars taken with picks they traded away?

A few weeks back, I got an email from a reader named Chris W., who’d been working on a project with his son that he thought would make for a fun post. Their question: Which team can make the best six-man starting lineup out of stars who were drafted with picks that they’d traded away?

Sounds good, and the timing is perfect – this is exactly the time of year when teams are getting ready to trade picks for immediate help, probably while muttering about how those future picks probably won’t even amount to anything at all. And they might not. But every now and then, a team sends away a pick and then watches it turn into way more than they bargained for.

Which team can build the best roster of regret? That’s going to be today’s post. But first, a few ground rules ™:

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Making a case for why every team should trade their first-round pick this week

With the draft now just hours away, most GMs are no doubt working the phones to see if there’s a trade to be made. After all, this is the time of the year when most of them have a valuable asset burning a hole in their pocket: Their first-round pick.

Draft-week trades involving firsts are rare, but maybe not as rare as you think. Last year, we saw six trades involving first-round picks get made on the draft floor or in the days before, including deals involving Alex DeBrincat, Kirby Dach and Alexander Romanov. Whether it’s flipping picks, dumping bad contracts or adding a big name to the roster, the first-round pick is the coin of the realm once the draft draws near.

So who should trade their first-round pick this year? Well, everyone.

At least, that’s the premise of today’s piece. I’m going to try to make the case for each and every team to trade away their first. Admittedly, this will be easier for some teams than for others. For a few, it might seem completely ridiculous, no doubt leading to many very serious people being angry in the comments about a fake trade their team will not make. That’s fine, it’s almost July and my brain hasn’t been working since early March, do your worst.

We’ll work in tiers. (As opposed to working in tears, which is how I cover the playoffs.) Let’s make a deal, starting with the easiest cases to make and building up to the tougher ones. We can do this.

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The Ahtletic Hockey Show: Talking trades

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- We discuss the human side of NHL trades
- Is it time to worry about the Jets?
- Tony DeAngelo spears Corey Perry in the pills
- Brainstorming future NHL bobbleheads
- Jonathan Quick's role in Vegas
- Listen mail, this week in 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)

With the NHL deadline done, I have a nagging question about all those trades

Trade deadline season is finally past us, with a wild few weeks that saw a ton of action. Our trade grades page lists over 30 trades that were worth debating. Some big names were moved. And that’s not even mentioning all the other stars that were rumored to move and didn’t, with some of those discussions sure to resume in the offseason. As a fan, it was pretty great, and it might even be the new normal.

And through it all, something has been bugging me. Do me a post-deadline favor and indulge me as I try to work my way through it.

I want to be clear on what’s going to happen here. Usually, when I throw out an opinion, it’s because I’m trying to convince you that I’m right. I want to change how you think about something. I think I know what the answer is, and I’m trying to get you on board with me.

I’m not sure whether that’s what I’m trying to do here. It might be. But it’s also possible that what I really want is for you convince me that I’m wrong. Your job might be to talk me out of this.

That’s because I’ve spent most of my writing career celebrating the art of the trade, and I’ve made it clear that I love this part of the sports world. Heck, I want to see even more of it. In over a decade of doing this for a living, I may have written more words about trading than any other subject.

But I haven’t written these ones: Are all these trades a good thing? Should we be celebrating them?

Imagine you’re an NHL player. You’re a celebrity, probably rich, and living out your childhood dream while playing a game for a living. You’re also a human being. It's possible that you could be struggling with your mental health, or marriage issues, or addiction, or bad decisions. You might be helping to care for an elderly parent. Maybe your spouse is struggling in their career, or your kid is going through a tough time at school. Through it all, you’re trying to do your job while also dealing with real life, just like the rest of us.

Then one day you get a phone call: You’ve been traded. Your whole life is being upended. You now live in a new city, or time zone, or country. There’s a car on the way and you’re expected to be on a plane in a few hours, to start a new chapter of your life. And you’ve got absolutely no say in the matter.

Is that OK? Is that even a question worth asking?

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Puck Soup: Three minute warning

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- We try (and fail) to spend only three minutes on every NHL trade from the last week
- Maybe some other stuff but seriously there were like 140 trades to get through.

>> Listen on The Athletic
>> Subscribe on iTunes
>> Listen on Spotify

>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.

Remember some trades: One underrated NHL trade deadline deal for all 32 teams

Everyone loves a good deadline trade, with the possible exceptions of players, their families, most teammates, and the GMs who get mocked and then fired for screwing them up. But sure, everyone else, which is to say sportswriters like me who need content.

That’s especially true when the trade is a genuine blockbuster featuring a big name. Those are the sort trades that get remembered forever, with fans still reciting details decades later. But most deadline deals aren’t like that, and sometimes they can even fade from our collective memory. That doesn’t mean the trade didn’t matter, but it does give us an excuse to go back and pick an underrated trade from every team’s deadline history.

The premise might be a little tricky here, since one fan’s underrated move is another’s obvious blockbuster. We’ll try to thread the needle as best we can, looking for deals that ended up being important but that might not be all that well-remembered outside a given market. We’ll even dig up some old links to send you even further down the rabbit hole. It’s deadline week, it’s not like you were going to get any work done.

Sound good? Cool, let’s remember some trades.

Anaheim Ducks

The Ducks are a fun place to start. They’ve made some memorable deals over the years, including the ones that landed Teemu Selanne in 1996 and sent him to San Jose in 2001, plus a busy deadline last year. But the trade that best fits our premise came in 2003, when the Ducks sent a young Mike Commodore and prospect Jean-Francois Damphousse to Calgary for veteran center Rob Niedermayer. That deal was a winner in more ways that one – Niedermayer helped the Ducks make a surprise run to the Cup final that year (along with fellow deadline pickup Steve Thomas), then stuck around long enough to be a key reason that his brother Scott signed as a free agent in 2005.

Arizona Coyotes

For Arizona’s deadline deal, let’s go with the Antoine Vermette trade. No, the other one, and that’s part of the beauty of it. The 2012 trade that saw the Coyotes get Vermette from Columbus for picks paid off nicely during that year’s playoff run. Vermette stuck around for three years, was dealt to the Hawks at the 2015 deadline in a more memorable deal that landed the Coyotes a first-round pick, and then even came back that summer as a UFA.

Boston Bruins

The Bruins have a long history of taking advantage of dumb teams on the trade market, but finding a deal that qualifies as underrated is a bit trickier. I don’t think Adam Oates in 1992 would qualify. Taylor Hall can’t, and neither can Hampus Lindholm. You know what, let’s go with the 2006 deadline move that sent Sergei Samsonov to Edmonton for two players and a second-round pick that turned into Milan Lucic at that summer’s draft. (Bonus fun fact: The pick that would become Brad Marchand was traded that same day, but it went from the Coyotes to the Islanders; the Bruins later acquired it on the draft floor.)

Buffalo Sabres

I don’t think we can count the 2003 Danny Briere deal, so let’s go way back for our Sabres pick. At the 1981 deadline, they sent all-star Rick Martin to the Kings for a first-round pick two years down the road. This one ended up being contentious, since Martin was hurt and was at risk of missing the playoffs, leading to the rare sight of the trades terms being renegotiated after the fact. The 1983 first stayed in the deal, though, and ended up being fifth overall, and the Sabres used it on Tom Barrasso, who immediately won the Vezina as a teenager. The deadline pick that turns into a star goalie trick works well for them; they pulled it off again in 1999 when they flipped Mike Wilson for the pick that became Ryan Miller.

Calgary Flames

Their deadline history includes trading away a young Brett Hull, plus an old Jarome Iginla to two teams on the same night. But I’m going to go with a classic hockey trade that features six great 90s names: Gary Suter, Paul Ranheim and Ted Drury to Hartford for Zarley Zalapski, Michael Nylander and James Patrick. Why yes, that would be Chris’s brother, William’s dad and Ryan’s uncle all in the same trade, because there are like nine families left making all the NHL players.

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Weekend rankings: Meier, Kane, Trotz, and a look ahead at what should be a wild deadline week

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.

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Mailbag: LTIR trade dump rosters, birth-year numbers, coach swaps and more

We’ve got one week to go, and then we can all stop writing about the same thing over and over sit back and enjoy trade deadline day. While we wait, let’s open up the mailbag and see what kind of nonsense you all came up with this month.

Note: Submitted questions have been edited for clarity and style.

In light of Coyotes Legend Shea Weber: Which team has the better overall roster, Team Midseason Dead Space or Team Summer Dead Space? Team Midseason Dead Space  is any space that was traded from opening night to the trade deadline, while Team Summer Dead Space is from whenever the Stanley Cup was awarded until final rosters are due.

I doubt you would get a full 20 players for each side, but I bet you could definitely get a shinny game together. And seeing how they're all LTIR guys anyways, that's probably for the better. – Jacob B.

Sounds like fun, although I’m guessing Team Summer will win this one. Let’s find out.

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Which team can make the best current roster of players they traded away?

We all love trades. Trade are the best. There’s no better feeling than finding out that your favorite team has made a big deal.

Well, unless they trade away somebody good.

That’s the problem with the trading game – most teams have this weird thing where they want to get something back in return. In today’s NHL, that’s often just cap space, or some draft pick you’ll forget all about. But occasionally, teams still trade away actual NHL talent. And sometimes, that talent ends up looking pretty good in their new home.

So today, let’s see which team can make the best starting lineup out of guys that they’ve traded away. We’re talking current NHL talent – the three forwards, two defensemen and a goalie that your team traded and might wish you had back right now. We’re only counting the trades that put a player on his current team, so the Oilers can’t claim Taylor Hall, for example. We’re not counting draft picks that turned into players, and we’re not looking at free agents or waivers or anything else. Just those player trades, please.

It's harder than you’d think to build full six-man lineups for most teams. Hard, but not impossible, and they don’t pay me to do the easy stuff. Let’s go through a few teams and see what we can come up with.

Buffalo Sabres

Let’s start with the obvious: Rebuilding teams are going to be our prime target here, because those are the teams that are trading established players away. And no team has been rebuilding longer than the Sabres. As soon as I had the concept for this post, I knew the Sabres would be my first stop.

And sure enough, there’s a ton of talent to work with. Too much, in fact, at least up front. We can start with Jack Eichel, who went to Vegas in last year’s blockbuster. We can also use Sam Reinhart. And for our third spot, we can have our pick of either Taylor Hall or Ryan O’Reilly, with Marcus Foligno available as depth. That’s about as good as we’re likely to get for a forward group.

The blueline isn’t quite as strong, but still has some options. The Sabres fleeced the Flyers into taking Rasmus Ristolainen a few summers ago, and we could pair him with Brandon Montour. Not exactly a Norris-worthy pairing, but not bad, and with five players down our Sabres lineup is in great shape.

That’s where it falls apart though, as I don’t think there are any active NHL goalies who were traded to the current team by the Sabres. We could argue over Jonas Johansson, who was traded from Buffalo to Colorado but recently had a brief waiver stop in Arizona, but he’s only played one game this year. The big miss is Linus Ullmark, a former Sabre who’ll probably win the Vezina but was a free agent, not a trade.

So somewhat surprisingly, the Sabres aren’t going to run away with this. Let’s check in on another rebuild to see if we can do better.

Chicago Blackhawks

The Hawks haven’t been at this as long as the Sabres have, but Kyle Davidson has made up for lost time over the last year or two. And unlike Buffalo, we have a clearcut goaltending option in Marc-Andre Fleury, dealt to the Wild last season.

Up front, we don't even need to wait on Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews, because we can lean on last year’s draft sell-off to start with Alex DeBrincat and Kirby Dach. And we can find a solid third option if we reach back to 2018 for the Nick Schmaltz trade. Sorry Brandon Hagel, we’ll keep you on speed dial.

The blueline is OK, with Adam Boqvist and Nikita Zadorov. That makes Chicago our first entry with a legitimate six-man group, and it’s a solid one that might get even better very soon. It doesn't feel unbeatable, though, so let’s check in on one more rebuild.

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Scrap the cap? No more NTCs? Seven ideas to bring back the NHL blockbuster

It’s trade deadline season in the sports world, with the NBA’s just passing and the NHL’s a few weeks away. And let’s just say that basketball’s GMs have set the bar high for their hockey counterparts.

That’s usually how it works. The NBA is notorious for dropping massive blockbusters, both during the season and over the summer. It’s not unusual to see a a franchise player or two on the move, and the trades are often multi-team monstrosities that you need a PHD to fully break down. This year, NBA fans saw one of the best players of his era traded in a shocking move that came together overnight, and it was just one of many major deals.

Meanwhile, NHL GMs are constantly complaining that their job is too hard, simple player-for-pick deals take weeks to hammer out, and we’re all still trying to figure out who Vladislav Gavrikov is.

It wasn’t always like this. The NHL used to have plenty of big, bold trades. But over the years, the market has dried up, and there are some years where the deadline comes and goes and the biggest targets are guys you’ve barely heard of.

Maybe this year will be different. A few legitimately big names have already moved, and at least a few more reportedly on the block. But it’s certainly fair to say that the art of the deal isn’t what it used to be in the NHL. So why is that? And more importantly, is there anything we can do about it?

If you start from the premise that more trading is good for the league’s overall entertainment value, then it seems like we should want to encourage bigger and better deals. Great. But how? Today, let’s walk through seven ideas that could move the needle, and see if any of them could actually happen.

Idea 1: Allow more salary retention

The idea: Fans know the drill with salary retention by now. A team trading away a player can retain up to 50% of their cap hit (and real dollars) for the full length of their remaining contract, with a max of three retentions per team at any given time.

But why stop at 50%? What if we let teams retain as much as they wanted to, all the way up to 100%?

Why it would work: It would pretty obviously make midseason trades easier, especially for big-ticket stars. Imagine if the Blackhawks could trade Patrick Kane while retaining as much of his salary as the other team needed them to… at a cost in picks and prospects, of course. Remember, we’re not doing anything to circumvent the league-wide cap here, because the full cap hit is still in place. It’s just with a different team.

As an added bonus, this would reduce if not eliminate those weird third-party double-retention trades that tend to just be overly complicated and confusing.

Why it wouldn’t: Some GMs would object, just like they did over a decade ago when Brian Burke was originally pushing for the retention idea. Back then, they felt like the idea went against the spirit of a hard cap, and made it too easy for teams to get out of bad contracts. Their arguments weren’t good in 2012, and they won’t be good now.

How much I like it: I’d like to aim a little bigger, as you’ll see in a bit. But as a compromise or an interim step, we could do worse.

Odds of it happening: It feels like allowing 100% retention might be a bridge too far, but I could absolutely see a world where we went higher than 50%.

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