Matt Vensel catches up with Jim Rutherford.
It was 1994 when Jim Rutherford last approached a trade deadline with — gasp! — no deals to make.
Jim Rutherford, the Hall of Fame wheeler and dealer, will be sitting out the NHL trade deadline Monday for the first time since 1994. That’s the year before he made the leap from the Ontario Hockey League to the old Hartford Whalers.
He shot down speculation from this reporter that he would spend Monday at a local flea market, searching for bargains and haggling with strangers.
“Actually, I do have something to do,” Rutherford said Thursday with a laugh.
You can catch Rutherford on TV during TSN’s deadline day coverage.
Rutherford remains in Pittsburgh, waiting for his contract with the Penguins to expire this offseason. He remains open to other management opportunities in the NHL. In the meantime, the former Penguins GM is loving all this time with his family and is happy to report that he has received one of the COVID vaccines.
“I’m stress-free for the first time in about 30 years,” he said. “It’s been a nice break. I’ve enjoyed watching the games, watching all the teams play. I never miss any of the games with the Penguins. They’ve been really fun to watch.”
Not currently in the GM chair and worrying about making all the right moves, he agreed to discuss how deadline-day deals typically develop.
In the weeks leading up to the trade deadline, Rutherford would work with his hockey operations department and the coaching staff to identify what the team needed and put together a list of targets. It was not uncommon for him to get a call from coach Mike Sullivan, suggesting he consider a particular player.
“Then I start the conversations with the other GMs,” he said. “They usually linger on because they want to get more teams involved and get the ultimate value back. So it usually leads closer to the deadline. The odd time, a player’s name just pops up out of the blue that we hadn’t talked about or thought about.”
At the start of deadline day, Rutherford typically had a whittled target list.
“Heading into his first deadline day with the Penguins in 2015, Rutherford wanted an experienced, responsible defenseman who could complement Kris Letang and their other offensive-minded blue-liners. He ended up acquiring two.
A few days earlier, St. Louis and Anaheim had given GMs little indication that they were looking to move Ian Cole and Ben Lovejoy, respectively. That changed in a hurry. Rutherford and Co. scrambled to do homework on those two.
On deadline day, the Penguins announced 85 minutes before the 3 p.m. cutoff that they got Cole. Rutherford had no time to celebrate. He turned his attention to Lovejoy, acquiring him from Anaheim with minutes left on the clock.
“You don’t have time to think about that [first] deal a lot. Everybody goes into action. Everybody has something to do,” he said. “Sully would have to tell a player if he was leaving. Somebody has to call the new player. And another person calls to tell them how they’re getting to Pittsburgh and all those details.”
Bringing in rentals Cole and Lovejoy, with the Penguins giving up Robert Bortuzzo and Simon Despres, didn’t pay immediate dividends in 2015. But they brought both back and they helped them win the Stanley Cup in 2016.
Even with all the research done prior to deadline day, there is no guarantee that a newcomer will quickly acclimate to the dressing room and the coach’s system. Then you heap on added pressure of being billed as that missing piece.
Rutherford said a good example of a time he felt “really comfortable” acquiring a player was the Ron Hainsey trade prior to the second Cup run in 2017.
“I think it was Lou Lamoriello that said to me that Hainsey could walk down Broadway in Manhattan and the buildings could be falling down and he’d still walk as if nothing was going on,” Rutherford said. “Nothing bothers that guy.”
Still, Rutherford indicated that isn’t the norm. Which is why the longtime executive said he wouldn’t gleefully pop bottles at the end of a busy deadline day.
“On one hand, you’re happy you got the player. On the other hand, when there’s such a short period of time left in the [regular] season, all players can’t make that adjustment to a new team,” he said. “There would be no celebration until you win that last game of the playoffs. That’s the celebration you want.”