Grantland grab bag: Important advice on your fake deadline day twitter account

In the weekly Grantland grab bag: a good week for comedy, whiny GMs, and the time a Kings fan threw a live chicken on the ice.

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Grantland: Eight Great NHL Trade Breakouts

If you’re an NHL general manager pulling the trigger on a trade, there are a few ways the move can blow up in your face. Maybe the star player you get back has nothing left. Maybe the deal messes up your team chemistry. Maybe somebody gets hurt. Maybe your owner panics and forces you to overpay.

Or every once in a while, maybe you get what has to be a GM’s worst nightmare: when an established player you’ve traded away suddenly takes his game to the next level.

We’re not talking about the long shot prospect who develops into a star down the road. We mean the guy you had on your roster and thought you knew pretty well, who almost immediately transforms into one of the league’s elite players. Suddenly, a deal that might look defensible or even downright smart at the time it's made ends up haunting a franchise for a generation.

Here are eight deals that saw teams give up on a player who turned out to be a year or less away from making the leap to superstardom...

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Ways NHL front offices are using advanced technology

Hey cool, looks like Steve Yzerman finished
running the playoff probability calculations.

Last week was an interesting one for sports fan who enjoy peeking behind the curtain at the world of high-stakes front office decision making.

In one article, James Mirtle explained how the Penguins relied on advice from an outside analytics agency to make the trade that brought James Neal to Pittsburgh. The data went beyond simple statistics to track where on the ice shots were coming from.

Meanwhile, NBA teams like the Toronto Raptors are taking things a step further. The franchise recently gave Grantland a tour of the proprietary tools they've developed based on SportVU camera technology. The software allows the team to track player movements and analyze performance in intricate detail.

Some saw that post and concluded that hockey is still trailing basketball when it comes to modern technology, but I'm not so sure. According to sources, several NHL teams are using computers to varying degrees in an effort to find a competitive edge.

Florida Panthers - Thought about developing a web-based database that could tell us everything we could ever want to know about each one our star players, but then realized somebody else had already invented WebMD.

Detroit Red Wings - Are using a program that tracks their players wherever they are on the ice or, in the case of Niklas Kronwall delivering a bodycheck, two feet off the ice.

Nashville Predators - Probably shouldn't have let Sergei Kostitsyn update all their software, since now they can't find the "No" option on the dialog box that says "Are you sure you want to quit?"

New York Rangers - Have kept their best players in the lineup thanks to computer technology that lets them hack into private email accounts and find those photos that we wouldn't want anyone else to see, WOULD WE BRENDAN?

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Grantland grab bag: You won't like Ron Asselstine when he's angry

In the weekly grab bag: Mush madness, the visor debate, NTC stupidity, and why it's a really bad idea to turn your back on an angry Bear.

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Grantland: Ten names to watch as we approach the trade deadline

We’re still two weeks away from the NHL’s April 3 trade deadline, but there’s a good chance action could pick up over the next few days. Recent history has shown a trend toward a quieter deadline day, with most of the bigger deals going down in advance. And because of this season’s modified post-lockout schedule, this week’s annual GM meetings are taking place before the deadline instead of after.

So now seems like a good time to get an early jump on the speculation with a look at 10 of the players who are showing up in trade chatter. Not all of them will be traded (let’s face it, there’s a decent chance none of the top players will), and we all may have moved on to 10 different guys by next week, but right now, these are some of the bigger names driving the rumor mill.

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