Down Goes Brown: NHL Trade Deadline winners and losers
Photo credit: Steve Kingsman/Getty
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.
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: Colorado Avalanche
Sorry, Avs fans. There's really no excuse here.
Despite being mired in one of the worst seasons in the history of the salary-cap era, Joe Sakic managed to make only one deal of any significance. That was for Jarome Iginla, and Colorado didn't get much for him. That's fine – if anyone deserves a chance to win somewhere, it's Iginla, so at least Sakic found a way to make that happen for him. But to do absolutely nothing else borders on unforgivable.
Again, as we've covered in recent weeks, that doesn't mean he had to move Matt Duchene or Gabriel Landeskog at a discount. Sakic's reported asking price for those players was high but reasonable.
But he didn't find a taker for any of his other pending free agents. He didn't unload any bad contracts with term. He didn't add a single prospect of any note. Nothing.
And sure, you could point to the Avalanche season and ask, "Who would want anything off that roster?" But when you're the GM of a bad team, being a salesman is part of your job. You can't wait for the market to come to you; you have to go out and create it. That's easier said than done, of course. But as others have pointed out, teams that are in last place overall have one job at the deadline: unload so you can reload.
For whatever reason, Sakic couldn't get it done. And now it's probably fair to wonder if he's still around to get another shot in the off-season.
Winner: Vancouver Canucks
There might not be a GM in the league who's taken more criticism over the last year. From questionable off-season trades to a wishy-washy approach to rebuilding, Benning hadn't done much to inspire confidence.
So he was an unlikely candidate to emerge as one of the deadline's top performers. But here we are. After a year of clinging to hopes of a playoff spot, Benning made the right call and shifted firmly into rebuild mode. And he got an excellent return for doing so, landing top prospect Jonathan Dahlen, a good young player in Nikolay Goldobin and a conditional pick that reportedly could end up being as high as a first.
In a perfect world, he would have kept going and found a taker for Ryan Miller. But with the goaltending market appearing to go ice cold, that was always going to be a longshot, so we'll give him a pass.
Benning's taken his lumps, many of them deserved. Let's give him some credit for a job well done this week.
The deal that sent Burrows from Vancouver to Ottawa was a divisive one from the Senators' perspective. Some saw a team recognizing a chance to emerge from an unusually weak Atlantic Division and loading up to make the most of the opportunity, trading a well-regarded but untested prospect in the process. Others saw a classic deadline disaster, featuring a team giving up one of its better young players for a washed-up veteran who hasn't moved the needle in years.
In either case, one winner was clear: Burrows himself. The longtime Canuck was a rumoured buyout candidate last year and was heading towards an uncertain UFA future this summer. Given how the market has treated other depth veterans in recent years, it was fair to wonder if he might be left out of the big spending on July 1.
He won't have to worry. Within hours of the trade going down, Burrows had signed a two-year extension with the Senators, one that will pay him $5 million and even includes no-trade protection. It's a pay cut, sure, but that's still a great deal for a guy who's about to turn 36 and has a lot of hard miles on him. For the Senators, the extension felt like a classic shiny-new-toy mistake. But for
Burrows, Christmas came early.
Winner: The Battle of Ontario
There's a decent chance that the Leafs and Senators could meet in the playoffs, marking the first matchup between the one-time rivals since 2004. That rivalry has cooled significantly over the years, largely due to the Leafs never being any good, and there was a risk that a matchup this year could be awkwardly free of bad blood.
Then came the deadline, and two moves that could help inject some malice back into what was once a pretty epic rivalry. Obviously, the Burrows deal helps immensely – there are few players in the league who are as easy to hate (and who embrace that role as enthusiastically). But let's not forget new Leaf Brian Boyle, whose playoff history with Ottawa includes this whole thing:
It's not Darcy Tucker dive-bombing an entire bench, but in a rivalry-starved NHL, every little bit helps.
