Anything you can do I can do better. Even if it’s nothing. (Bruce Bennett, Getty Images)
A grand total of 17 trades were made on April 3rd, most of them happening close to the noon (Western) deadline, making it utterly pointless for TSN Tradecentre to start at 8 AM and making it even more pointless for me to wake up at 5 AM Pacific to run a livechat for Pass it to Bulis. If you thought Archi Zuber and Kyle Smith had it tough with their trade deadline drinking game, I was mainlining Beaver Buzz after 3 hours of sleep and taking care of a 16-month-old child at the same time. You punks in the East have it easy.
Ah, the hard knock life of a blogger.
The biggest criticisms on trade deadline day are frequently reserved for the teams that do nothing. Since I was running a Canucks-centric trade deadline chat, I saw a lot of frustration when the deadline came and went without a single trade for the Canucks, particularly with Roberto Luongo still sitting on the bench with a $5.3 million cap hit. But the Canucks didn’t really do nothing. The Derek Roy trade may not have happened on trade deadline day, but it was still a deadline deal.
So let’s extend things back to March 22nd, when the New Jersey Devils acquired Matt D’Agostini from the St. Louis Blues. That essentially gives us a two-week window of “trade deadline” trades. Things really kicked off in earnest when Pittsburgh traded Joe Morrow for Brendan Morrow and had me secretly hoping they were bringing Ethan Moreau out of retirement simultaneously.
There were 37 trades made during the 2 weeks leading up to the deadline. So which teams did the least? Six teams made just one trade: the Colorado Avalanche, Detroit Red Wings, Florida Panthers, Montreal Canadiens, Toronto Maple Leafs, and Vancouver Canucks. Two teams, however, did absolutely nothing — the New York Islanders and Winnipeg Jets — and they’re both in very similar situations.
