Trade deadline a lot about nothing
Parity and parody. Cause and effect.
The National Hockey League’s trade deadline day — breathlessly hyped for weeks in advance by media outlets blithely ignoring reality — turned into a liberally lampooned lollapalooza of lassitude Monday, as anyone who follows the difficulties of making trades in the modern NHL had to know it would.
Too many teams are jammed up in standings skewed by loser points. Too many think they’re still alive for playoff spots, and most of them are mistaken. Too few sellers, inflated asking prices, the salary cap, a potential lockout, GMS already antsy about taking on long-term contracts . . . the deadline frenzy is a misnomer now, and might forever be so.
That didn’t prevent a 10-hour television marathon of blather, filler, rumour, disappointment and post-mortem, which passed with so few impactful deals, it was rather like a replay of Oscar night: Nine nominated films, many of them obscure, and a lingering sense that for all the bludgeoning the Academy did about the evening’s fabulousness, at the end you were left asking: “Is that all there is?”
No blockbusters were made Monday, only some interesting character actors exchanged.
The winner? Nashville, it appears, which for hours made the day’s only deal, getting a bit more dangerous — on the ice and, alas, off — with Montreal forward Andrei Kostitsyn rejoining his brother Sergei in Music City, where temptation beckons from every door on Broadway.
Later, the Predators, advertising an intent to take a run at the big prize (perhaps to justify this: http:// deadspin. com/ 5888319) added size and toughness in forward Paul Gaustad.
Or maybe the Sabres won the day, prising a firstround pick out of Nashville for Gaustad, then adding promising forward Cody Hodgson from the Vancouver Canucks at the buzzer for bruising winger Zack Kassian in an exchange of former first-rounders.
The big loser? Take your pick.
Start with every team (or its fan base) that had pipe dreams of Rick Nash arriving from Columbus on his white steed to cure all ills, and every town that overvalued the players it traded away, which is every town.
Vancouver Canucks fans will mourn the unrealized potential of Hodgson, who never did find room to flourish in the team’s centre-heavy top end, and they ought to worry about the readiness of the big (six-foot-four, 228), mean, skilled Kassian, 21, who not only hasn’t shown big-league chops yet, but will have to work hard to stay out of the penalty box and out of sheriff Brendan Shanahan’s crosshairs. Hodgson was made redundant by the earlier addition of veteran third/fourth-line centre Sami Pahlsson from Columbus, so the Canucks are surely deeper up front than the team that lost Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final last spring and — if Kassian is good enough to stay up — less likely to be pushed around with impunity the way the Boston Bruins abused them in June.
Fans in Edmonton seem to think they lost the swap of defencemen that sent Tom Gilbert to Minnesota for Nick Schultz. The braying masses of Maple Leaf Nation, frantic for general manager Brian Burke to do something, anything, may bemoan the idea of giving up on six-foot-six, 220-pound Keith Aulie at 22, that age when so many young defencemen finally begin to figure it out, sending him to Tampa for big forward Carter Ashton, who’s been playing in the minors in Norfolk.
The Ottawa Senators swapped Brian Lee for Tampa’s Matt Gilroy in a trade of defencemen, the patient Winnipeg Jets and the downward-spiralling Montreal Canadiens shed players for draft picks, and the Calgary Flames stood pat . . . with a busted flush.
So 15 trades were made, involving 31 players and 11 draft picks, barely half the record 31 deals made two years ago. And no one can be absolutely certain that any team got markedly better, because nothing matters until the playoffs, and the playoffs are a war of attrition in which the wrong injury or the slumping goaltender can sink the stoutest of ships.
That’s why it’s fun to guess, but ultimately about as big a waste of time as viewing the standings at Halloween and projecting what it’s all going to mean at crunch time.
Remember that snapshot? Before the cream rose and the ballast sank, four months before the screws were tightened at the trade deadline, when both Stanley Cup finalists, Vancouver and Boston, would have been on the outside looking in if the playoffs had started Oct. 31?
Edmonton was the No. 1 seed in the West, battling Colorado for tops in the Northwest. Detroit was tied for 12th in the conference.
Toronto was fighting for top spot in the Northeast. Boston was last in the conference, arm-wrestling Winnipeg and the Islanders.
Pittsburgh, without Sidney Crosby, was leaving the Atlantic in its rear-view mirror. The Philadelphia Flyers were not worried about giving up three-plus goals a game because they were scoring nearly four.
What that topsy-turvy beginning achieved was to string out the period of time it would take to unravel the knot, and to give false encouragement for a longer period to teams that didn’t really have a chance but — by Feb. 27 — still hadn’t figured that out.
Because early season is to trade deadline as trade deadline is to the playoffs.
A preamble, a tease, and for all but a secure few, a crapshoot.