KNIGHT’S TALE
Vegas lands deadline’s big prize in quest to return to final.
As long as you realize the NHL trade deadline doesn’t usually change much, it’s a blast.
It’s always a day of great conversation. Even the prime minister likes it, particularly as a chance to discuss his Canadiens rather than his wayward cabinet members. Perhaps he could start a federal aid program aimed at finding ways to convince star hockey players to want to play in the nation’s capital.
But NHL deadline day hardly ever shifts the league’s tectonic plates.
True impact players are rare, and rarely available in late February. Players who seem like they might be impact players are available, usually because some other team has fallen out of love with them or their salary, or because those players are looking to get out of places they’d rather not be.
At the trade deadline, our perspective as hockey observers gets out of whack after months of complete inactivity by most NHL teams. We think the mere appearance of big business at the deadline makes the players involved more important than they actually are, and we hugely devalue how hard it is for players from weaker teams to quickly integrate themselves into different roles with much stronger clubs.
We imagine that because Mark Stone gets points in Ottawa he’s going to become an unstoppable force in Las Vegas, or that Kevin Hayes is going to automatically raise his game after being told he’s now a resident of Winnipeg rather than Manhattan. We assume a good player on a losing team is going to become a much better player on a better team, and will be over the moon to relocate.
It just usually doesn’t work that way.
Instead, the status quo usually is maintained across the league. So if you believed the San Jose Sharks were, after acquiring Erik Karlsson last summer, the odds-on favourite to win the Stanley Cup, you probably should still think that.
The only thing that has really happened over the past six months that should alter your opinion has been the superb play of the Tampa Bay Lightning in surging to first place overall in the NHL, not the trades of the past few days.
In many cases, players traded at the deadline just aren’t prepared to make a difference to a new team. Need an ex- ample? How about Tomas Plekanec, acquired by the Maple Leafs last winter as deadline “help?” He was terrible, and went back to Montreal as fast as he could. By contrast, Michal Kempny was quietly picked up at the deadline by Washington last winter from Chicago for a third-round pick, a trade no one heralded, and he was a key contributor on the blue-line when the Capitals won the Stanley Cup.
Which brings us back to San Jose. If anything, the Sharks are a bit stronger and a bit better bet to win it all than they were in October, having slowly gathered steam as the season has progressed. They are a stable, deep, experienced team, and changed just a little bit by adding rental Gustav Nyquist. The Sharks should be as tough an out in the spring as any team.
Columbus, by contrast, rebuilt 20 per cent of its team, adding Matt Duchene, Ryan Dzingel, goalie Keith Kincaid and defenceman Adam McQuaid. Four players from three below-average teams. It certainly makes the Jackets different, sure, and after months of thinking about trading Artemi Panarin and goalie Sergei Bobrovsky, they didn’t. But this hardly feels like quality team building, folks. It feels like an old-fashioned CFL airlift of NFL cuts.
The truth is even good clubs can’t improve that much at the deadline. Just a little. Nashville has become the boldest trading team in hockey in recent years and added sturdy Wayne Simmonds and shifty Mikael Granlund on Monday, hoping they can help more than ornery Ryan Hartman and talented Kevin Fiala could. But that’s an informed guess by general manager David Poile, not a guaranteed outcome. As a veteran of more than 40 of these deadlines, Poile would be the first to tell you that.
Stone to Vegas, meanwhile, is as intriguing as much for the fact Golden Knights GM George McPhee continues to refuse to build in the same slow and steady manner in which expansion teams have traditionally built as it is for whether Stone can get the club back to the Cup final.
The rest of the league treasures futures. Vegas, a secondyear team, doesn’t seem to have any organizational belief there’s a future beyond right now. Remember last year’s deadline? Vegas traded a package of picks, including its firstrounder, to get Tomas Tatar, which turned out to be a truly awful trade for Vegas.
Undaunted, the Knights traded Tatar and former firstround pick Nick Suzuki last summer to get Montreal underachiever Max Pacioretty, who’s been just OK this season. That didn’t faze McPhee either. On Monday, he included another player drafted in the first round, promising defenceman Erik Brannstrom, in a package to get Stone, and then gave Stone an eight-year contract.
That truly is a fascinating franchise to watch. But it’s not at all clear the Golden Knights are now a bigger threat to win the Cup.
The NHL’s trade deadline, while entertaining in many ways, is rarely immediately transformative. and this year is likely no exception.
Tampa did nothing and still looks to be the best. San Jose is still the club to watch in the West. Washington is still the dangerous defending champ, and a team that added some Kempny-like tinkering by adding winger Carl Hagelin and defenceman Nick Jensen over the past week.
The likelihood is that in June we’ll look back and realize nobody got themselves a Butch Goring-like difference maker at the deadline.
It just seemed like they did at the time. Which made for great conversation.