Trade deadline winners and losers

After months of speculation, weeks of rumours, and hours of… well, not all that much, really, the NHL trade deadline has passed.

By law, that means everyone must now immediately declare winners and losers.

Usually, we slap those labels on the teams themselves. But with so few of them actually wading into the action, we may need to dive a little deeper. So here are a dozen other winners and losers in the immediate aftermath of what turned out to be a remarkably quite deadline.

Winner: The Blackhawks’ GM tree

We sometimes hear about coaching trees in various sports – the group of coaches who can trace their career paths back to a common start with a specific team or staff. The coaches take a back seat on deadline day, but the GMs are front and centre, and it was hard to ignore how many of them had connections to one team.

Chicago’s Stan Bowman was deadline week’s biggest player, landing one of the biggest names available when he pried Andrew Ladd out of Winnipeg. The GM on the other side of that deal: Winnipeg’s Kevin Cheveldayoff, who’d been Bowman’s assistant for the Blackhawks’ first Cup win. Bowman then turned to another former assistant, this time Marc Bergevin in Montreal, to pick up Dale Weise and Tomas Fleischmann.

Meanwhile, the only GM giving Bowman a run for his money on the buyer’s market was Dale Tallon of the Florida Panthers. Tallon, of course, built much of the Hawks’ Cup-winning core before making way for Bowman in 2009, and he spent the past few days trying to put together another contender in Florida.

We don’t know exactly what’s in the Blackhawks’ orientation handbook for new front office employees, but it’s safe to assume that “play it safe” doesn’t show up anywhere.

Loser: Jonathan Drouin… and maybe Steve Yzerman too?

Drouin’s the easy call here. He walked away from the Lightning organization in the hopes of forcing a trade, and he didn’t get one. Now he’ll have to wait for the off-season, and unless he comes back, it will cost him a year of free agent eligibility. He can’t be happy right now.

Yzerman and the Lightning may also end up looking back on the day as a missed opportunity. This is a team with a legitimate shot at the Stanley Cup – maybe their last shot of the Steven Stamkos era. They didn’t ask Drouin to walk away, but once he did, it gave them a trade chip that you’d think could bring in some serious reinforcements. Instead, nothing.

Was that a mistake? We can’t say without knowing what was on the table. Maybe the Lightning win it all anyway. And maybe they get a much better haul in June than was available in February. But Yzerman, who managed to take a tough situation with Martin St. Louis and turn it into a great deal, couldn’t make it happen here. He may regret it.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet.ca

Weekend report: Trade deadline preview

Faceoff: Deadline day arrives

Welcome to the only Monday morning anyone will be happy to see all year.

At least, I hope it's Monday morning. Things move fast on trade deadline day, and if you're only reading this in the early afternoon then half of what you're about to see will be obsolete. If it's Monday evening, forget it. (But feel free to read on, then tell me how wrong I was about everything.)

After an unusually quiet run up to deadline week, we finally saw some action over the weekend. Stan Bowman got his shopping done early, landing Jets captain Andrew Ladd in a major deal on Thursday and then stocking his roster with reinforcements by adding Dale Weise, Tomas Fleischmann and Christian Ehrhoff.

The Ladd deal was pricey, coming at the cost of a first-round pick and a top prospect, but the Hawks are clearly in win-now mode and it's a testament to Bowman's cap management skills that he had room to add as much as he did without being forced to pay someone to take Bryan Bickell's deal off his hands. (Of course, if he did find a taker for Bickell's deal today, he could add even more, which has to be a scary thought for the teams below.)

Other deals soon followed. The Panthers were a mild surprise as the next team to load up, making three deals on Saturday to bring in Jiri Hudler, Terry Purcell and Jakub Kindl. The Penguins rolled the dice on Justin Schultz, who'd never lived up to expectations in Edmonton but could give Pittsburgh's powerplay a nice boost. The Blues added some goaltending depth by sending a pick and a prospect to the Oilers for Anders Nilsson, and the Sharks did the same by landing James Reimer.

The Blackhawks have already done some major lifting, highlighted by the Ladd deal. —Photo Dennis Wierzbicki-USA TODAY Sports

That set the stage for Sunday's big deal, which saw the Hurricanes send captain Eric Staal to the Rangers for two second-round picks and prospect Aleksi Saarela. It's yet another big midseason move for the Rangers, who've made a habit of making these sorts of deals over the years. This one came relatively cheap—they didn't give up a first-round pick, and Saarela is a good prospect but far from a sure thing—and the Hurricanes retained half of Staal's salary to make the dollars work.

So are any names left on the market? Not as many as you'd like if you're a TV producer putting together a full day's worth of coverage, but deadline day is always busy. Several teams still haven't made moves, or at least not the kind of moves they'd like to, and there are always a few unexpected names that shake loose in the final hours. One way or another, today should be busy.

To mark the occasion, we'll dispense with the usual power rankings this week. Why bother, really, given that both the league's best and worst teams figure to look a lot different by the end of the day. Instead, let's borrow the format to take a look at the remaining buyers and sellers under the most pressure as the clock ticks down.

The buyers

The five contenders with the most work to do today.

Now that Bowman and the Hawks have set the goalposts, the league's other top contenders have some work to do to catch up—or to explain to frustrated fan bases why they chose not to.

5. Washington Capitals

On the one hand, they're already an excellent team—one that would go into the playoffs as the Eastern Conference's prohibitive favourite even if they didn't add anyone at all. On the other, the entire season has been played under a cloud of "Yeah, but..." as fans wait to see whether this is all just a setup for yet another chapter of playoff heartbreak. This is quite possibly the best team in franchise history, and that makes the question of how big a move to make a tricky one.

So what do you do if you're Brian MacLellan? Adding Mike Weber last week was a depth move, but he doesn't qualify as a major piece and the loss of John Carlsson to the IR and last night's Brooks Laich trade creates enough cap room to add something. The Caps were heavily rumoured to be in on Ladd, which suggests that one of the other top wingers could be a fallback.

The team is good enough that MacLellan could probably get away with standing pat, using the old "Don't want to disrupt the room" standby. You'd figure that Caps fans, antsy as they are, would accept that today. But check with them in June—or earlier—and they may have a different view.

4. Los Angeles Kings

They've added Rob Scuderi, but you'd figure they're not done yet. No GM has had more deadline success than Dean Lombardi, who has twice pulled off major trades that helped pave the way to Stanley Cup wins. Last year's Andrej Sekera deal didn't work out so well, and Lombardi doesn't have a first rounder or much cap space to work with. They already picked up Kris Versteeg, but the Kings may feel pressure to do something more, especially if we see reinforcements headed to our next team...

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

Grab bag: Trade rumors, CATLAGs, and Patrick Roy vs. the Wings

In this week's Friday grab bag:
- Your favorite team might trade a guy, but will they get something in return?
- Introducing the CATLAG player, the deadline's most inescapable storyline
- An obscure player gets traded for Wayne Gretzky
- The week's three comedy stars
- And a look back at a classic highlight of the greatest rivalry of all-time

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

The 20 stages of finding out your team has made a trade

With Monday afternoon’s trade deadline looming, hockey fans are expecting a whirlwind of deals over the next few days. The moves will range from minor to major, and if we’re lucky we’ll even get a few old-fashioned blockbusters thrown into the mix. And we’ll devour them all, because NHL trades are always fun.

That’s especially true when the trade involves your favourite team. So now, during what’s left of the calm before the storm, it’s a good time to prepare yourself for your team’s pending moves. Every trade is different, but all fans go through a specific set of stages when they find out their team has struck a deal. You’ve been there before, and the chances are good that very soon, you’ll be there again.

Here are the 20 stages of finding out that your favourite team has made a trade. If and when they get involved in the action, feel free to check them off as you go.

Stage 1: Hearing that your team may have made a deal

The first stage usually starts with a tweet or an on-air comment from an insider that they're "hearing something might be up.”

Once you see your favourite team mentioned, it's time to go into shutdown mode. All work at the office grinds to a halt. Commuters pull over to the side of the road. It's perfectly acceptable to stand up in the middle of class and yell "SILENCE" at your teacher or professor. All the normal rules of etiquette and social order are suspended until the deal is announced.

Stage 2: Rampant speculation about what the trade might be

This is the fun part. In the brief period between hearing about a deal and knowing the full details, your imagination can run wild. Maybe it's a mega-blockbuster. Maybe it's the kind of move that puts the franchise on the road to a championship. Maybe all the guys you can't stand are being shipped out, and all your favourite players are on the way in. For a precious few moments, the possibilities are endless.

The point is, this is a time for wild conjecture and baseless speculation. Enjoy it. Revel in it. There's no need to pump the brakes.

Stage 3: Wondering if Connor McDavid will wear a different number on his new team

OK, maybe pump the brakes a little bit.

Stage 4: Finding out the details of the actual trade

It's never quite as big a deal as you hoped it would be. But still, a trade is a trade. Time to get to started on working through all the ramifications.

Stage 5: Immediately talking yourself into the biggest name your team just acquired

Instinct kicks in, and as a fan, your instinct is to believe. So yes, this is exactly the sort of player your team has needed. You only get so many opportunities to improve in this league, and you have to grab them when they come along. Besides, the change of scenery will probably give the new player a boost. Not like he needed one.

This is a great trade. You like this guy. You've always liked this guy.

Stage 6: Casually deleting years of tweets, blog comments and forum posts where you made fun of the new guy

No, really, when you said he was "an overpaid boat anchor who'll inevitably drag down any team dumb enough to employ him," you meant that in the good way.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

The five best trade deadlines by eventual Stanley Cup winners

Only one team ever truly “wins” trade deadline day, and it’s the team that goes on to capture the Stanley Cup.

That’s what they say, anyway. It seems like a pretty simplistic way of looking at things, if we’re being honest, since all a GM can ever be realistically asked to do is to put his team in the best possible position to win. Nothing is ever guaranteed in life, and the idea that you’re retroactively wrong to have even tried unless everything works out perfectly seems a little fatalistic.

But either way, there is something special to be said for the GM who swings for the fences at the deadline and then sees it all pay off in a Stanley Cup parade a few months later. So today, let’s give the spotlight over to the few who’ve managed to pull it off. Here are the five best trade deadline week hauls by teams that went on to win the Stanley Cup that same season.

#5: Detroit Red Wings, 1997

The Red Wings have a fascinating trade deadline history. They’ve been good for so long that no team has had more opportunity to load up for deep playoff runs. And since GM Ken Holland virtually never makes deals during the first four months of the season, that leaves the Wings with lots of work to do most years at the deadline.

And they’ve had some big ones, although with mixed results. They landed Matthieu Schneider in 2003 and Robert Lang in 2004, plus Todd Bertuzzi in 2007 and Brad Stuart in 2008. In more recent years they’ve gone after guys like Kyle Quincey, David Legwand, Eric Cole and Marek Zidlicky. And they had one of the greatest “load up and go for it” deadlines of all-time back in 1999, when they pulled off the Chris Chelios blockbuster while also adding a who’s who of grizzled veterans, including Bill Ranford, Ulf Samuelsson and Wendel Clark. But that team didn’t win it all.

Instead, we’ll point back to far simpler deadline. Back in 1997, the Wings (then under the guidance of co-GMs Jimmy Devellano and Scotty Bowman) acquired future Hall of Famer Larry Murphy from the Maple Leafs. That’s it. That was the whole trade. The Leafs were embarking on a youth movement and wanted to unload the 36-year-old Murphy’s hefty salary, so they didn’t bother to ask for anything in return.

They say you can’t get something for nothing, but the Wings proved that wrong. In this case, that “something” turned out to be five more seasons of solid play from Murphy, including back-to-back Stanley Cup runs. It’s hard to do much better than that.

>> Read the full post at The Hockey News