It was trade deadline day in the NHL Wednesday and it was a good day for… the American Hockey League’s Manitoba Moose. Amazing.
Moves by the Moose’s parent club, the Vancouver Canucks, meant that Vancouver’s AHL affiliate got to add centre Yan Stastny and veteran defenseman Brad Lukowich. That just about summed up the 2010 NHL trade deadline day. It didn’t do much at the NHL level, but quite a lot at the AHL level.
It also meant that the Ottawa Sun’s 300 rumours were all wrong. Or made up.
There were a record 30 trades made on deadline day involving 55 players and 27 draft picks and not one of them could be called a blockbuster. In fact, here was the trade deadline in one, single word: Dull.
Of course, that’s what a salary cap will do.
Because of the cap, instead of taking a big plunge in a search for stars that could lead teams to a Stanley Cup – oh, yeah, and cost a lot of money, too — the buyers made a lot of small deals that didn’t change their cap levels much. That’s why, after making seven small deals and being well under the cap, the Phoenix Coyotes were Wednesday’s big winners.
That didn’t make the other NHL owners happy, but by adding a bit to their own payroll, the Coyotes got considerably better. They acquired Derek Morris from Boston, Wojtek Wolski from Colorado, Mathieu Schneider from Vancouver and Lee Stempniak from Toronto. Sure, when a team the league bought for $140 million is likely going to lose between $50 million and $70 million this year, it would definitely piss off the some of the owners of other NHL teams because they not only have to foot the bill for the losses, but also to improve the club.
Of course, if the Coyotes don’t make the playoffs, they’ll lose the $70 million end, not the $50 million end. With only six weeks left in the season, the players acquired at the deadline won’t really cost that much.
Meanwhile, deadline day was a perfect time to illustrate the wait-until-next-decade attitude of the Toronto Maple Leafs. On Tuesday the Leafs dealt Alexei Ponikarovsky to Pittsburgh for defenseman Martin Skoula and middling prospect Luca Caputi.
The Leafs then sent Skoula to New Jersey for a fifth-round draft pick. In other words, the Leafs sent a big forward who will play on a line with Sidney Crosby – and was probably their best player — to Pittsburgh in exchange for a fifth-round pick and the slow, journeyman Caputi.
Now isn’t that an illustration of the state of the Toronto Maple Leafs?
Deadline day was good for something.