The Big Trade

The salary cap era of the NHL has killed the excitement of the big trade simply because the big trade is so rare, and the timing of the big trades that do happen has become so predictable. There’s usually one or two at the trade deadline, one or two at the draft, and maybe one more just before the season starts.

So you can imagine the shock when my best friend, now a writer at the Hockey News, left me a voicemail yesterday at about 11:30 that said “Dion Phaneuf is now a Leaf”. My favourite player on my favourite team had been traded to Toronto. It’s a feeling that had become almost completely lost on me and quickly remembered in that moment.

But that wasn’t all. After getting home and firing up my computer to check things out online and get the details of the trade, my friend sent me another message: “Giguere is next”. What? How can that be? They are going to pull not one, but TWO huge trades in one day? Within hours of each other? Amazing. Sure enough, it was announced that Jean-Sebastien Giguere was also a Maple Leaf.

I don’t want to comment on the trades themselves, but rather the feeling you get when your team, or any team for that matter, pulls off a big trade completely out of nowhere. Brian Burke was right when he said in the news conference that these trades are good for the game and that it’s a shame they don’t happen more often in the salary cap world. It creates interest and creates excitement.

Sure there are still big trades, but like I said, they are predictable in their timing and the feeling isn’t the same as when they come mid-season completely out of the blue. You go into the trade deadline knowing there will be one or two big trades, and often you know exactly who the big name at the center of them will be before they happen. The only question is where will those players be going. You know going into the draft there will probably be a significant trade at some point. And it seems every off-season there is a disgruntled player who asks to be traded and ends up being moved sometime during the summer.

Yesterday was an exciting day. Let’s hope that in the future, two GMs are willing to roll the dice mid-season the way Brian Burke and Darryl Sutter did.

-matt