Weekend wrap: Here come the Blackhawks

This time last week, we figured we were counting down to something, even if we weren’t quite sure what. Well, the deadline has come and gone, and we were right. That was… something.

A week ago, it looked like we could be in for a deadline that would shake things up as far as the top contenders were concerned. Instead, while we saw plenty of deals over the course of a busy 72 hours or so, it’s fair to say that the Earth didn’t exactly shift beneath the road to the Stanley Cup.

The biggest-impact players on the block didn't go anywhere, as Joe Sakic and the Avalanche decided to wait until the summer to break up their flailing core. Other big names, like Patrick Sharp, Shane Doan and Radim Vrbata, also stayed put for various reasons. Most of the top contenders chose to tinker rather than bring in major reinforcements. And the two best players who did move ended up going to the teams that were already sitting at one and two in our power rankings.

So was it all just a big waste of time? Not quite. For one, the Capitals' grip on overall-favourite status got a lot tighter, and barring some sort of late-season slump we can pretty much pencil them into the top spot for the rest of the year. The Wild made it clear that they're all-in to emerge from the Western Conference. And even the Senators signaled that they're serious about emerging from the Atlantic, recognizing that there may never be a clearer path through the division than the one in front of them right now.

But we didn't get the sort of seismic change we might have seen if, say, the Rangers had landed Kevin Shattenkirk or a team like the Canadiens had pulled the trigger on Matt Duchene. Time will tell if those teams end up regretting their cautious approach, although history tells us that big deadline moves can backfire at least as often as they work.

So sure, the balance of power shifted, even if only slightly and mostly in the direction of the teams who already had it. Now we find out how much any of it ends up mattering.

Meanwhile, a contender that's been in and out of the top five all season has caught fire and shot up the rankings. That could end up being more important than any of the deals that did or didn’t get made last week. More on that in the next section.

Road to the Cup

The five teams that look like they're headed towards Stanley Cup–favourite status.

5. San Jose Sharks (38-19-7, +26 true goals differential*): They came out of last night's showdown in Minnesota with a regulation loss, the first time in eight games they haven't managed a point.

4. Pittsburgh Penguins (40-16-8, +43): When they're healthy, the Penguins still seem like they have as good a shot as anyone to win it all. But right now, Kris Letang is hurt, and this didn't sound good.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Podcast: Evaluating all 30 teams' deadlines

In this week's episode of Biscuits, the Vice Sports hockey podcast, Dave and Sean go through the entire league and evaluate every team's trade deadline, including questions like:
- What were Joe Sakic and the Avalanche doing?
- Will the Rangers regret letting Kevin Shattenkirk go to the Caps?
- What was up with Shane Doan?
- Did Steve Yzerman misplay his Ben Bishop hand?
- Seriously, Sakic knew the deadline was this week, right?
- Did Jim Benning really win the deadline?
- Minnesota overpaid for Martin Hanzal, but was that OK?
- Did Garth Snow just prove Dave's "secret 10-year contract" theory?
- Like, do calendars work differently in Colorado maybe?
- And much, much more...

>> Stream it now on Vice Sports

>> Or, subscribe on iTunes.

Grab bag: In which Garth Snow actually does something

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- It's OK to like that trade your team just made
- Conditional draft picks (or why the NHL hates you, part 847)
- An obscure player who was involved in two important trades
- The week's three comedy stars
- And a look back at the night that Matthew Barnaby tragically died on the ice, only to be brought back to life by Garth Snow...

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

Trade deadline winners and losers

The NHL Trade Deadline was today. You may have heard about it. We posted a few articles about the topic over the last month, and there was even some TV coverage.

In all, we had 19 deals today and 35 in total over the last week. Now that the 3:00 ET deadline has come and gone and any trade-call stragglers have been wrapped up, we can get to the good part: Immediately slapping “winner” and “loser” labels on everything, even though we have no idea how any of it will turn out.

Let’s get started. We’ll lead off with the biggest deal of the week.

Winner: Washington Capitals

The league's best team landed the deadline's biggest addition. And they did it without giving up quite as much as we thought they might. That's a pretty clear win.

No, Kevin Shattenkirk didn't exactly come cheap, costing the Capitals this year's first, a decent young player in Zach Sanford and maybe a second. That's not nothing.

But it's also not an unbearable price for a Stanley Cup favourite. And that's especially true if, as rumoured, Metro rivals like the Penguins and Rangers had interest. Brian MacLellan has sent a clear signal that his team is all-in on a Cup this year.

That might feel like an uncomfortable position for nervous Caps fans who've been burned by hope before. But for a franchise that's still seeking their first title, swinging for the fences seems like the right play. And MacLellan didn’t even have to overpay to do it.

Loser: St. Louis Blues

The flip side of the Shattenkirk deal is the team that gave him up.

Armstrong has since hinted that the market for Shattenkirk just didn't materialize the way he hoped it would, and the fact that the deal went down two days before the deadline suggests that was the case. That's partly on him – this is where a GM needs to be actively shopping, not just listening – but at a certain point there's only so much you can do. If everyone knows a guy is available and only one team was willing to pay up, you take what you can get, right?

Well, maybe. The other option is to keep the player and hope you can go on a playoff run of your own. Instead, Armstrong basically folded his hand, making it clear that he doesn't view the Blues as real contenders (a stance that was backed up by the Blues not making any other moves). That's a tough call for a GM to make, and sometimes accepting reality is the smart play. But in this case, you'd like to think that any sort of concession-style trade of a star would have also included a bidding war somewhere along the line.

But before we close the book on Shattenkirk, let's look at one more angle.

Loser: Henrik Lundqvist's window

The Rangers had been linked to Shattenkirk, but ended up watching him head to a division rival while getting a cheaper blueliner in Brendan Smith. In the long term, that makes perfect sense. It's still widely assumed that Shattenkirk lands in New York as a free agent, so the Rangers will probably wind up with the player they want and hold onto their first-round pick in the process. Solid work.

And yet...

In 2005, the Rangers got a gift from the hockey gods when a sixth-round pick from five years earlier arrived and almost immediately established himself as one of the best goaltenders in the world. That's Lundqvist, of course, and he's done everything the Rangers could have asked over the last decade-plus. But he turns 35 tomorrow, last season was the first time in his career he finished outside the top six in Vezina voting, and he struggled through much of this year's first half.

He's been better since, posting a .928 save percentage in February to help the Rangers to a 9-4 month, one that firmly reestablished them as legitimate Cup contenders. Still, when the dust cleared, it was the Capitals who walked away with the deadline's biggest prize. We don't know if the Rangers were even bidding — to hear Armstrong tell it, not many teams were — but they had the picks and cap space to make the move. They chose not to, and a team that the Rangers may have to go through to get back to the Cup final stepped up instead.

And again, that probably makes sense, especially if they sign Shattenkirk in July. But Lundqvist only has so many playoff runs left him as an elite goaltender, and one more of them is likely to slip by while the Rangers refocus on the long game.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Requiem for a hockey trade

Today is trade deadline day, which means you can expect to hear certain words repeated over and over. "Buyers." "Sellers." "Rentals." Those are the key terms on a day filled with bad teams flipping players to good teams in return for future assets.

But back in the old days, there used to be a different term that showed up occasionally on days like today: "Hockey trades."

To be honest, back then we pretty much just called them "trades," and they went something like this: Two teams exchanged players in a deal where both sides were trying to get better. Nobody was throwing in the towel and rebuilding, and nobody was sacrificing future assets for a short-term boost. Just two teams, both trying to improve their rosters right now, and using a trade to do it.

I know. Crazy stuff.

But it did happen. And we even sort of got one Tuesday night -- the Brandon Davidson/David Desharnais deal, while not anyone's idea of a blockbuster, was at least kind of hockey-ish. So today, while we wait for the rental market to heat up, let's look back at five true hockey trades from deadline history where there were no clear buyers and no sellers, just two teams trying to get the best end of a deal.

1989 – Mike Gartner and Larry Murphy for Dino Ciccarelli and Bob Rouse

Let's start back in 1989 with a classic hockey deal. No picks, no prospects, just a forward and a defenseman on each side of the trade.

Oh, and 75% of the deal ended up in the Hall of Fame. That's not bad for a day's work.

The deal saw Capitals GM David Poile trade away Gartner, at the time the franchise's all-time leading scorer, and Murphy, who'd been a Norris finalist less than two years ago. In exchange, the North Stars gave up their top goal-scorer in Ciccarelli and a hard-nosed blueliner in Rouse.

As it turned out, none of the players stuck around in their new homes all that long. Gartner was traded again at the 1990 deadline, and by the time Ciccarelli was dealt to Detroit in 1992, all four players had moved on. Still, at the time this was an impressive blockbuster, and in hindsight it's probably the most star-studded four-player deal in league history.

My favorite part of the lore of this trade: According to reports at the time, it was finalized exactly one minute before the deadline.

>> Read the full post at The Hockey News