The NHL had its worst deadline day ever
NHL’s big day has lost all its sizzle
NHL trade deadline day, emphasis on the dead.
It has been several years now since much of substance happened on the last day of the NHL season in which trades were allowed, but the 2017 version still felt like a bottoming out.
Perhaps it was because, even as Canada’s two sports networks began their all-day deadline broadcasts at eight in the morning on the East Coast, their hosts were busy telling everyone not to get too excited: Please join us for our blanket coverage of ... not that much, actually.
Or because, as is usually the case now, most of the big-name pieces — Kevin Shattenkirk, Ben Bishop — were moved in the days before the deadline.
Or because, as the day began, some of the top trade targets included Jarome Iginla and his eight goals this year, and Curtis Lazar and his one assist.
Or because, as front offices have cottoned on to the full impact of a hard salary cap, executives have become increasingly nervous about making a gamble today that cannot be easily fixed tomorrow, or even six months from now.
It was all of that, and the looming expansion draft, that combined to make this the grimmest deadline day in memory, except for those moments when TSN’s James Duthie accidentally hit the Siri button on his iPhone on live television — Siri was confused — and when his colleague Jeff O’Neill asked for a burger with ketchup into a live microphone. This leads to a key question: will the NHL do anything to help alleviate the boredom of trade deadline day? And a secondary question, which is more relevant: Does the NHL even have reason to care?
Although the June expansion draft for the Vegas Golden Knights is a one-off affair that made potential trades less attractive this year — why give up something for a player you could lose for nothing in three months? — deadline day has been trending toward Dullsville for some time.
While the salary cap has been in place for more than a decade, it took a while for the majority of teams to understand some of the essential truths a cap world created: draft picks have serious value, and young, cheap talent is required to offset the pricey contracts of established stars.
It wasn’t that long ago that draft picks and prospects were the major currency of deadline day, with contending teams happy to part with them in exchange for veterans to load up for a Cup run. Today, an NHL GM is as likely to trade his left arm as he is a first-round draft pick, and the former deadline-day staple of veteran-for-prospect has been replaced by veteran-forconditional-promise-of-maybesomething-but-only-if-you-giveus-some-money-too.
Consider that Colorado traded Iginla, who is 39 years old and still making US$5.5-million this season, to Los Angeles for a conditional fourth-round draft pick, and the Avalanche are still eating half his remaining salary. If the Kings fail to make the playoffs — it’s a 50-50 proposition at this point — Colorado will receive nothing and will have paid money to receive that nothing.
But that bit of salary retention wasn’t as enjoyable as Philadelphia trading Mark Streit to Tampa Bay, who then traded him to Pittsburgh, with the Flyers still paying 4.7 per cent of the defenceman’s remaining ticket this season. Not 47 per cent. Four-point-seven per cent. If nothing else, it serves to illustrate how so many teams are so pressed by salary cap concerns that even shaving a few metaphorical nickels off a contract is useful — and how those concerns ultimately squelch many a possible deal.
This is how you end up with a trade deadline day in which TSN had as many awkward cross-promotional comedy bits on TradeCentre as it had actual trades to announce.
There would be ways to loosen the deadline day shackles, if the NHL were so inclined. It could allow for an extra cap cushion for the remaining days of the regular season, which would give prospective buyers the breathing room they don’t otherwise have. It could restrict player movement at other times of the season, the better to funnel everything into the trade-deadline week, much like soccer leagues do with their limited-time transfer windows. It could move from the hard cap to something like a luxury tax that still allows the wealthiest teams to add costly players if they are willing to pay a steep penalty.
But those are all far-reaching solutions to what is a uniquely, weirdly, Canadian problem. An exciting trade deadline day is better for all NHL fans, but it’s only in Canada that we have elevated it to a daylong bit of navel contemplation/performance art. It’s not Gary Bettman’s fault that neither TSN nor Sportsnet want to be the first to back away from the precipice and admit that maybe 10 hours of deadline coverage is about seven hours too many.
Maybe 2018 will be the year someone blinks, but I doubt it.