Hockey’s insiders back showing they’re masters of the trade
When the trade dams burst this week, thankfully, the hours (of hard work) turned into minutes (on air)
“Have you heard anything?” the NHL general manager asked, and Darren Dreger hadn’t, not really.
There is always gossip, and the phones never stop getting worked. But through a combination of the diving Canadian dollar, a flat salary cap, and unprecedented parity in the NHL, the league was an off-ice ghost town in the first three months of this season. General managers got to the point where they were asking Dreger, one of TSN’s hockey insiders, to see if they were missing anything. They weren’t. “I don’t ever remember it being that slow,” says Dreger.
Wednesday afternoon, the dam finally burst. At 4:42, Renaud Lavoie of TVA Sports tweeted that Vinny Lecavalier was being traded from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. At 4:44, TSN’s Bob McKenzie said Luke Schenn was going, and maybe Lecavalier too. At 4:45, he said both. At 4:46, TSN’s Darren Dreger said the return was Jordan Weal and a thirdround pick. At 4:47, Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman reported the same thing.
There was more. Philadelphia was retaining salary, which Friedman and Dreger tweeted at almost the exact same time, 4:54. At 5:01and 5:02, respectively, McKenzie and TSN’s Pierre LeBrun both reported that Lecavalier would retire at season’s end, which was the other key to the trade. Meanwhile, at 4:58, Dreger also reported centre Mike Richards, out of the game after a drug case, had been signed by the Washington Capitals.
The hockey world reacted as it always does to the increasingly rare hockey trade: like a dog chasing the first squirrel it has ever seen. Then the Columbus Blue Jackets tweeted 90 minutes later that they had traded centre Ryan Johan- sen to Nashville for defenceman Seth Jones, and hockey had an elusive true blockbuster to talk about. It capped what might have been the most exciting 110 minutes of the hockey season that didn’t include 3-on-3.
“Most exciting hour and a half since last July 1st, pretty much,” says LeBrun, who also writes for ESPN.
Everybody who follows hockey knows the insiders. McKenzie, Dreger, LeBrun and Friedman are the big four in the English-language media, though the specific order can change in your Twitter feed on any given day.
At Sportsnet, Nick Kypreos, Damien Cox and Chris Johnston can also chip in. Lavoie is the main French-language insider.
And frankly, they were all getting a little bored, in a season where the biggest off-ice move was Ben Scrivens for Zach Kassian. Friedman has a posse of friends who aren’t in the business, and this season they began to rib him: What non-existent trade rumour are you making up this week? He would tell them about something that might happen, and they would laugh. “A GM would joke with me, you can’t even make up a trade right now,” says Friedman. “And I understand that at times (trade talk) makes it difficult for the players and their families, but it’s what really drives the interest.
“But you reach a point sometimes, when it’s been so long since anything happened, when you say, am I making this up? Am I pouring gasoline on a non-existent fire?”
There’s more to their jobs than just breaking a trade, of course, but it’s more fun when the daily chase has a payoff. The environment is more slippery than ever, too. McKenzie mentions the league’s great beat writers, and points out that Wednesday, Aaron Portzline of the Columbus Dispatch had already written a story that set the stage for the deal. Teams are making the job harder; it used to be that insiders could exploit the gap between the trade call and the news release, but now paranoia-gripped teams don’t always wait.
“See, everybody got into the game,” says McKenzie. “The agents have Twitter, the teams have Twitter, everyone has their own website, everyone has their own brand. Before, teams didn’t care as much.”
Still, their jobs never stop. Calls are still made, whispers chased to dead ends, possibilities discovered and aired. The hunger for trade talk eclipses the game itself, if any exists.
“We reported early in the season that Ryan Johansen was in play, and that ruffled some feathers, but that’s where we are now as insiders,” says Dreger, who heard that Jones might be available earlier in the week, but couldn’t nail it down. “A few short years ago — and we don’t often speculate, when we say something it’s because we have a good source, right? — you wouldn’t go on (TV) and throw out a young player’s name unless you believed that a deal was very close if not imminent. Well, Twitter, social media, times have changed. Now even a shred of information about a young player, a Matt Duchene, Ryan Johansen, being in play? That’s enough.”
“Now it’s not enough to break the story,” says McKenzie. “You’ve got to have the insight necessary to explain why it happened, what the impact is going to be, even ahead of time. It’s probably more important to set up the parameters of what’s going on with, say, Jonathan Drouin in Tampa Bay right now, rather than break who he gets traded to, because everybody’s going to have it in two minutes anyway.”
This is the water they swim in. Friedman once broke a story while waiting in line for a roller coaster at Canada’s Wonderland. Dreger sleeps with the phone on his bedside, ringer at top volume, and his wife Holly has learned to sleep through it, since the night Mike Keenan called at 4 a.m. to tell Dreg- er he had been fired. One day McKenzie was on a long drive to his son Mike’s AHL hockey game in Binghamton, but kept having to pull off the highway to call or text or tweet about five different trades. LeBrun was at his cottage one day when he got a tip; he raced down to the dock, where there was a better chance of getting a slim thread of cellular reception. As he tried to send a tweet, he dropped his BlackBerry in the lake.
All four are friends, note how understanding their wives are, and are unfailingly respectful of one another; as Friedman puts it, “I think we all know that sometimes you bite the bear, and sometimes the bear bites you.” But Wednesday was a nice day for the insiders. The adrenaline rush was familiar, and fun.
On Friday afternoon Emerson Etem was traded to Vancouver for Nick Jensen and a 2017 sixth-round pick. McKenzie speculated about the destination first, but Friedman beat McKenzie by a minute, and LeBrun by a minute after that. Another day.