We’re two weeks from the trade deadline, the most important day on the regular-season calendar for Stanley Cup contenders, or teams that would like to become contenders. It’s the one time of year when the floodgates open, and players who’d never be available under other circumstances suddenly shake free, often costing nothing but future assets. For a smart general manager, this is the time to shine and to make the big move (or two or three) that will push his team across the finish line and earn him a big shiny ring.
Unless it’s not. Maybe the deadline is a trap, an overrated flea market in which bad teams try to dump their overpaid and underperforming junk on desperate suitors, all while being cheered on by media and by TV networks hungry for a story. It’s when, as Brian Burke once claimed, GMs of contending teams make more mistakes than on any other day, paying exorbitant prices for rentals that inevitably have no impact beyond disrupting team chemistry.
You get the picture. Part of the annual deadline story is the debate about whether it should even be such a big story at all, or whether this is all overhyped nonsense that teams should be happy to sit out. You’ll hear it again this year, when you’ll be reminded roughly 100 times that last year’s finalists, Vegas and Florida, had quiet deadlines.
We’re going to keep that debate going. But instead of listening to me, we’re going to let a few of history’s champions make their case. Let’s dig into the pros and cons of an aggressive deadline, as argued by the teams who won it all.
They’ve won the Cup five times since 1991, and all five involved significant deadline moves. In 2009, a year after a heartbreaking loss to the Red Wings, they geared up for the eventual rematch by adding winger Chris Kunitz and Bill Guerin. You know how the Kunitz story went, as he’d slot in as Sidney Crosby’s favorite winger for years to come. As for Guerin, while giving up a decent draft pick for a 38-year-old might seem reckless, it paid off with 15 postseason points. In 2016, they found Justin Schultz, who played a key role in back-to-back championships. In 2017, it was Ron Hainsey, a move that seemed minor at the time but turned out to be crucial when Kris Letang was lost in the playoffs.
Of course, those moves are small potatoes compared to arguably the biggest deadline deal ever made: the six-player blockbuster that landed Ron Francis in 1991. Back then, the Penguins had loads of talent but had never put it all together. Francis turned out to be the final piece, and despite how you may remember it, he didn’t come cheap, costing them a package that included a guy in the middle of a 110-point season. The Penguins could have told themselves that they had a promising core and just needed to keep running it back until everything clicked. Instead, they made one of the most aggressive moves ever and were rewarded with the first two championships in franchise history.
The obvious conclusion: No guts, no glory.
The argument against: Every modern Detroit Red Wings championship
You might remember these guys. Four championships in 12 years, a near-dynasty that saw them contend pretty much every year. For a decade or two, they were pretty good at the whole “building a winner” thing, and we can probably learn from them. So, how’d they do it?
Not at the deadline, as it turns out. Let’s go back to all four years that they won it all and see what kind of deadline swings they took.
They made just one move in 1997, getting Larry Murphy from the Toronto Maple Leafs. He’s a Hall of Famer and he did contribute to a few of the championships to come, but at the time of this deal, he was considered all but finished, so much so that the asking price to acquire him was literally nothing — an offer that nobody in the league was apparently willing to step up and beat. In 1998, they added a few more ex-Leaf blueliners in Jamie Macoun and Dmitri Mironov, not exactly major needle-movers. In 2002, they settled for Jiri Slegr. And in 2008, it was Brad Stuart.
That’s it. Five veteran defensemen of varying quality over four deadlines. The Red Wings weren’t afraid to make major trades back then, adding names like Brendan Shanahan and Dominik Hasek in big, bold moves. They just didn’t do it at the deadline.
You may figure that was some sort of organizational mandate, but that wouldn’t be quite true. The Red Wings did get aggressive at the deadline occasionally, including in 1999. Coming off two straight championships, they went all in on one of the most impressive deadline day hauls ever, landing Chris Chelios, Wendel Clark, Bill Ranford and Ulf Samuelsson. Then they lost in the second round, ending their hopes of a three-peat.
Add sparingly, win the Cup. Go hard, go home. The moral here is pretty clear.
This might have been the team we should have started with. Sure, it’s only one year. But it may have been the single most aggressive trade deadline day we’ve ever seen.
Neil Smith made five deals on that day, including three major ones. In doing so, he shipped off a first-ballot Hall of Famer in Mike Gartner and two very good young players, acquiring a bunch of role players and veterans. You could make a very strong case that, from a neutral view, the Rangers lost every one of those deals. Gartner was better than Glenn Anderson. A 20-year-old Todd Marchant was far more valuable than the husk of Craig MacTavish. And in maybe the worst deal of them all, Smith gave up Tony Amonte, a 30-goal scorer just entering his prime, for two veteran depth pieces in Brian Noonan and Stephane Matteau. Amonte went on to hit the 900-point mark.
Does any Ranger fan want a do-over? Of course not, because that team won the Stanley Cup. And while we’ll never know what would have happened if the Rangers had stood pat, the deadline haul led directly to at least one moment that feels like it was important. Neil Smith didn’t worry about looking bad, or hurting feelings, or his precious team chemistry. He went to work. If he hadn’t, we’re talking about an 80-plus-year drought in New York. Instead, Ranger fans can look back on one of the most memorable Cup wins of all time.
No guts, no glory, and flags fly forever.
The argument against: The 2007 Anaheim Ducks
Oh great, the Rangers, a big-market team from the pre-cap era. Very useful example. I’m sure it was appreciated by the 10 percent of readers who were even alive then.
Meanwhile, in the real world, we can look back at the 2007 Ducks. On the surface, it looks like they had a busy lead-up to the deadline, but none of those deals was exactly a blockbuster. (The multiple Shane Endicott trades are a good clue.) The only move of any significance was adding veteran depth guy Brad May. Otherwise, Brian Burke stood pat.
And that was no accident. This is the year that spawned that infamous Burke quote that we referenced up above, about GMs making their worst mistakes on deadline day. It’s not like Burke was afraid to make a deal — quite the opposite, both in Anaheim and at future stops. He was one of the boldest trade artists in modern NHL history, including pulling off the offseason blockbuster for Chris Pronger that basically won the Ducks this very championship. Burke loved the art of the deal more than just about any modern GM.
Just not at the deadline. There’s a lesson there.
The argument for: The 2006 Carolina Hurricanes
Oh, so we’re doing veteran GMs of the early cap era? Cool.
Admittedly, Hurricanes GM Jim Rutherford didn’t have the luxury of taking the deadline off, since nobody had been kind enough to gift-wrap him a Hall-of-Fame defenseman who’d just quit on his team. Instead, he had to roll up his sleeves and get to work, acquiring Mark Recchi on deadline day as well as Doug Weight a few weeks before.
It cost him plenty — a first-rounder, a second-rounder, two fourth-rounders and a bunch of young players and prospects. But it paid off in the franchise’s only Stanley Cup win, with Recchi and Weight both playing key roles along the way. Recchi was especially important, scoring six points in the Stanley Cup Final, including the winning goal in a pivotal 2-1 victory in Game 4.
As for those picks and prospects, not one of them turned out to be anyone the Hurricanes would especially miss. The best of the bunch was probably Mike Zigomanis. Help me run the numbers here, all you timid deadline-deniers — is Mike Zigomanis worth more than the Stanley Cup?
We said it once already, but it bears repeating: Flags fly forever. There’s one flying in Carolina right now because Rutherford pushed his chips in.
Deadline deals are great when they work, sure. But they rarely work, which is why we remember outliers like Recchi. The Capitals were a good team for a very long time, and they usually went chasing glory at the deadline. Their Alex Ovechkin-era history is littered with costly additions like Cristobal Huet, Joe Corvo, Jason Arnott, Jaroslav Halak, Kevin Shattenkirk and Martin Erat. They even landed Sergei Fedorov one year. And it didn’t help — the Capitals never even made it out of the second round.
Then came 2018, and the Caps mostly stood pat. Their big add was Michal Kempny, a 27-year-old with only 81 NHL games who a lot of fans had never heard of. And that was the team that finally broke through, winning the first championship in team history.
Flags fly forever, sure. And there’s more than one way to win one.
The argument for: The 2012 and 2014 L.A. Kings
Or: Maybe if the Capitals had been even more aggressive, they would have won more than just that one measly championship.
For the Kings, that meant a pair of midseason blockbusters with the Blue Jackets. In 2012, a few weeks before the deadline, they landed Jeff Carter. In 2014, it was Marian Gaborik on deadline day (along with Brayden McNabb in a separate deal).
Hey, guess what else happened in 2012 and 2014?
Both trades were big swings. Both were costly — the Kings gave up a first-rounder, a second-rounder and a conditional third-rounder, plus the 2005 No. 3 pick in 25-year-old Jack Johnson. And both players were expensive, with Gaborik carrying a $7.5 million cap hit and needing an extension, while Carter was signed through 2022. Conventional wisdom is that those sorts of trades are just too complicated to pull off during the season, especially given that neither of those teams was a Cup favorite or even a playoff lock. Luckily for Kings fans, Dean Lombardi didn’t think his job was too hard to be worth doing.
This isn’t rocket science. If you have a playoff contender, you buy, and you do it as aggressively as you can.
The argument against: Doug Armstrong’s St. Louis Blues
Like the Capitals, the 2019 Blues were another eventual Cup-winning team that barely did anything at the deadline. In their case, they settled for sending a sixth-rounder to the Ducks for Michael Del Zotto, who didn’t even dress in the postseason. That was it.
A quiet deadline was actually unusual for Doug Armstrong, who’d been busy in each of the two previous years — in a unique way. In both seasons, his Blues had been in the playoff hunt. And both times, Armstrong sold anyway, getting a first-round pick for Shattenkirk in 2017 and for Paul Stastny in 2018. His 2017 team won a round, while the 2018 team missed the playoffs by a single point. You take your swings, you take your chances.
Armstrong doesn’t care what the playbook says – he’s going to buy or sell or neither at all, or maybe even both on the same day. And when it was all over, he had his name engraved on the Cup after one of the few deadlines he took off. Don’t let anyone try to sell you simplistic narratives about one right way to do anything.
The Lightning show us both sides of the coin, so let’s start this story a year early, at the 2019 deadline, as rookie GM Julien BriseBois found himself guiding one of the best regular-season teams in history. The Lightning went conservative, sitting out the deadline altogether to preserve their chemistry. Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Whoops. They were swept in the first round, one of the most humiliating failures in modern postseason history.
Apparently, it was a lesson learned. The 2020 Lightning reversed course, and in the process showed us that you can win the deadline while breaking away from the typical formula. Instead of loading up on expensive short-term rentals, BriseBois paid up to land cheap depth in Barclay Goodrow and Blake Coleman. While both cost first-round picks, they played key roles in what would be back-to-back Cup wins.
The 2021 deadline saw BriseBois double down. He parted with yet another first-round pick, this one as part of a more traditional rental move for David Savard. The veteran blueliner had become that season’s must-have piece, the annual player who seems to come out of nowhere and have their stock hyped to the moon. The Lightning landed him, and he did … well, not all that much. The deal was kind of a bust, with Savard basically settling in as a third-pair presence.
But even then, an apparent overpay ends up making an argument in favor of an aggressive deadline. Because the Lightning won the Cup, the pick they moved was No. 32 overall. It wound up with the Blackhawks, who used it on Nolan Allan, a defensive defenseman who’s yet to play an NHL game three years later and who currently projects as “possibly” a big-league player. Do you think BriseBois stays up at night worrying about that pick he burned? Or is he too busy shining his multiple Cup rings?
So there you have it — the pros and cons of aggressive deadline activity, as argued by nine of the Stanley Cup winners who lived it.
Did I intentionally put a thumb on the scale by including an extra argument in favor? No comment! But now it’s over to you. Let me know in the comments if you want to see your contender go big or play it safe.
(Photo of Sidney Crosby and Chris Kunitz from 2017: Dave Sandford / NHLI via Getty Images)
