There’s an interesting quirk to this trade deadline season. Some teams at the bottom of the standings, in the best position to sell off players, don’t actually have many attractive assets for contending teams.
San Jose could move Mario Ferraro and the remaining two years of his contract, and then it’s a collection of expiring contracts, such as Kevin Labanc (two goals) or Mike Hoffman (eight goals). And if you knock on Chicago GM Kyle Davidson’s door, you’re probably looking in at Tyler Johnson.
And then there are some teams well out of the playoffs that have designs on returning stronger next season and may not want to sell the farm. Columbus and Ottawa come to mind here — both have the potential to make waves leading into March 8, but could straddle the line between buyer and seller.
Where that leaves us is with a mushy middle crammed with teams that either want to buy, or want to sell but have a wide range of outcomes over the final two months of the regular season that includes the possibility of a playoff berth … and the revenue that comes with it.
Today’s look at the NHL’s playoff push focuses on those teams in the hunt for one of the last playoff spots in their conference that face a really difficult call on what they do by next week’s trade deadline.
The Flyers preached a “New Era of Orange” over the summer when they hired Daniel Briere as GM and Keith Jones as president of hockey operations. After missing the playoffs for three straight seasons (their longest drought since the early-1990s), the Flyers brass said they were committed to “new ways to work, new ways to train and new ways to win.” This seemed to indicate some sort of rebuild was on the way.
When that new front office was put in place, CEO Dan Hilferty spoke of a “multi-year process” ahead. “We all are aligned that this effort, this new era, will take time,” Hilferty said. “We’re gonna do it the right way. We’re going to be calculated in everything we do and be measured in taking steps forward.”
Of course, they probably didn’t expect to be third in the Metropolitan Division on Feb. 28, just over a week from the trade deadline. The Flyers aren’t in the clear yet, but hold an advantageous position: five points up on New Jersey and six points up on Washington with one and two more games played, respectively. The rival Penguins may still be a team to watch here too, as they’re on a three-game winning streak and are seven points behind the Flyers with four games in hand (Pittsburgh also has the seventh-best goal differential in the conference).
If they trade out, then pending UFAs Sean Walker and Nick Seeler have been the most talked-about names potentially available from Philadelphia. There’s also talk they could re-sign one or both, especially with the news that Jamie Drysdale is out week-to-week and, potentially, the season. Morgan Frost’s name has been bandied about all season and Travis Konecny has even been a talking point, if the Flyers really sold off. But the Flyers have had staying power and face Washington, Ottawa, St. Louis and Florida before having to make their final calls on March 8. How they proceed could influence how other cutline teams approach the deadline.
“Washington, Pittsburgh, New Jersey, the Islanders, they’re looking at Philly saying, ‘That’s the team that we can catch and how do we decide what we do based on what they do?” Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman said on this week’s 32 Thoughts Podcast. “You know about financial pressures, though. Sometimes decisions get made for that reason.”
In making the playoffs for the first time last season, and then winning a round, the Kraken had the league’s highest five-on-five shooting percentage and scored 37 more goals than expected. That followed an inaugural season in which Seattle had the NHL’s 28th-ranked offence. In 2023-24, the Kraken have regressed in this department, currently sitting 28th with a 2.76 goals per game average and a power play that ranks 18th.
But this isn’t an exact copy of that first season, as the Kraken have the league’s fifth-best team save percentage (31st in 2021-22) helping to prop them up.
Still, the Kraken are the last team hanging on in the wild-card race and have five pending UFAs who would be attractive on the trade market, to some degree. There are no soft games between now and the deadline either, with Pittsburgh, Edmonton, Calgary and Winnipeg on the docket. How they get through that stretch of games looms large for GM Ron Francis.
“I still think they’re trying to sign Eberle,” Friedman said. “Some of their other guys like Wennberg, Schultz, Tatar, I think it could depend on the next few games.”
With four consecutive wins against playoff teams, the Flames have jumped over a few teams in the past week and are five points back of Nashville with one game in hand. That still is quite a distance to go in a loser-point world, but certainly not insurmountable. Heck, if Nashville wasn’t running even hotter than the Flames, Calgary may already have tracked the Preds down.
As Eric Francis wrote after Tuesday’s win against the Kings (a division rival also five points ahead), these Flames are playing with a newfound swagger as trade rumours swirl all around them. Pending UFAs Chris Tanev and Noah Hanifin seem all but a guarantee to be traded given the circumstances, but perhaps Jacob Markstrom doesn’t quite have to go yet, with another two years left on his contract.
The cruel fact about Calgary’s situation is that it looks and plays like a team that could punch above its weight in a seven-game playoff series. But standing pat and watching the likes of Hanifin or Tanev leave for nothing is probably not an option.
“How would you want to play that team in the first round if, in some world, they could have Markstrom, Hanifin and Tanev on their roster?” Friedman wondered. “If they got in as the eight seed, they’d give a team some trouble.”
Potentially one of the more interesting deadline teams if it does decide to sell, Nashville is nonetheless in a playoff spot at the moment and on a six-game winning streak that has created some space.
Juuse Saros is the big one we wonder about and, with Yaroslav Askarov playing so well in the AHL, the Predators may even see an opportunity to turn to their next-era starter now and still hang in the playoff race. They’d surely maximize a return on Saros if they dealt him now and gave an acquiring team two runs with him on a bargain contract.
But this is also about the sneaky-good pending UFA Thomas Novak, pending RFA blueliner Dante Fabbro and shot-block leader Alexandre Carrier.
“Nashville’s in the playoffs right now and they’ve got a few guys out there,” Friedman said. “They’ve got to make a decision on Novak and if they don’t keep him, there’s going to be a ton of interest in him.
“That is the fascinating thing,” Friedman continued. “It’s Nashville, it’s Calgary, it’s St. Louis, Minnesota, all those teams in that area could finish eighth, and do you decide, ‘Hey, we want that playoff spot’ or ‘Hey, we’re going to sell?’”
