The NHL's annual trade deadline this year is on March 3 at 3:00 PM EST, and everyone knows how hectic things can get on the trade front in the 24 hours leading up to that time.
Penguins' GM Ray Shero has made deals at the deadline in each of the last 3 seasons --- every one with him at the helm of the Pittsburgh ship.
This year, though, there's almost a second trade dealine of sorts, and that comes during the league's Olympic hiatus from midnight on February 12 to midnight on February 28, when there's a trade freeze and no deals can be made.
That deadline had spawned speculation that, rather than wait until the final hours before March 3, we might see deals before 2-12, and while many dismissed that as unlikely because teams that made deals before the Olympic trade freeze would be forced to spend salary cap money to pay players during 2+ weeks when they aren't suiting up for their teams, that angle obviously proved to be incorrect after two major trades that happened yesterday.
The Toronto Maple Leafs -- suffering through a miserable season -- were involved in both deals.
The Leafs' first sent 4 players to the slumping Calgary Flames, including 20-goal man Niklas Hagman and up-and-coming defenseman Ian White, in a package that netted them 3 guys in return, including underachieving name-defenseman Dion Phaneuf.
Toronto then turned around and somehow sent Penguin killer Jason Blake and his albatross contract along with inconsistent goaltender Vesa Toskala to the Anaheim Ducks for 6-million per season netminder and former Stanley Cup and Conn Smythe winner J.S. Gigeure.
On top of that, while one player who has always done well against the Penguins has left the Eastern Conference, apparently a different one may be on the way in, as the Flames are also reportedly on the verge of dealing Olli Jokinen and another player to the New York Rangers for Chris Higgins and Ales Kotalik.
Kotalik has already been sent home by the team and told he'd be traded, while Higgins was pulled from the Rangers lineup before face-off last night.
What could these landmark deals mean to Pittsburgh? Nothing on the surface --- unless they get other teams antsy about trading. If that happens, we might see a deal involving the Penguins sooner than later.
Curiously, of all the players said to be on the block from the Maple Leafs, the one guy the Penguins have been linked to -- Alexei Ponikarovsky -- was not dealt.
Ponikarovsky, with 19 goals this season, is said to still be on the block, however, so don't expect that chatter to die down.
What else is interesting is that I've heard from one source that the Penguins may be looking at adding a name-defenseman, rather than a forward, before the deadline this year.
Since there aren't many of those on the block, yesterday's Phaneuf trade -- together with the news that another one of those guys, Sheldon Souray, is likely out for a while after fracturing a bone in his wrist during a fight with Calgary Captain Jarome Iginla Saturday night -- could start the dominos falling there, and I'll be interested to see how that affects Pittsburgh, if at all.
I'm obviously planning on a lot more talk about the upcoming trade deadline during the Olympic break, but I'll certainly keep everyone posted on anything I hear in the meantime.
More tomorrow.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
What do you think of the possibility of maybe picking up Ray Whitney?
I think Shero would love to add Ray Whitney, and Shero is known to have had discussions with Carolina GM Jim Rutherford about Whitney. But I don't think it's going to happen because Whitney might very well be the most in-demand player on the market right now -- even more than Kovalchuk, becuase he's a guy most teams can't afford. Because Whitney is in such demand, the asking price is extraordinarily high -- said to be a first round draft pick and a player. I wouldn't move that for him, and I'm pretty sure Shero won't either.
Post a Comment