The Two-Line Pass

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The NHL trade deadline came and went yesterday with lots more action than anyone probably expected — save for maybe Roberto Luongo — but one team that didn’t exactly cover itself in glory was, not surprisingly, the Colorado Avalanche.

Puck Daddy gave the Avs, and GM Greg Sherman, a D+ for their lack of doing anything noteworthy at the deadline despite the fact that they’re dead last in the West (which, by the way, is quite a feat, because they’re in the same division as Calgary). That sounds about right. Ryan O’Byrne to Toronto for a pick, and decent defensive prospect Cameron Gaunce to Dallas for slightly younger, similarly-decent left wing prospect Tomas Vincour. That was it. Sherman didn’t try to unload any of those other contracts he’s been rumored to be trying to offload for some time now.

This is an appallingly bad team with numerous not-great contracts on it. Not that teams are lining up to acquire David Jones and his laughable $4 million a year through 2015-16 cap hit, but making any attempt to shed some of the worse deals weighing down the roster at the deadline — when it’s a seller’s market — seemed more advisable than waiting until the summer. By the way, as if to really show just how off-his-rocker Sherman is in thinking this team is good, he saw the calls he received from other GMs/vultures interested in some of his players as further evidence that he has a solid core in place and should not pursue the wiser course of action of selling anyone off. Even Jay Feaster isn’t that dumb, but one supposes it goes back to “intellectual honesty,” and Sherman is as bereft of that as his team is of playoff hopes.

Fortunately for Avs fans, he doesn’t seem long to hold his seat of power atop the Avs organization, and rightly so, but to say he’s bad at his job is one thing. To say he decided to stand pat is entirely because he thinks this is a team that can succeed at some point in the near future shows he they need to take him out of that office posthaste, preferably Hannibal Lechter-style so he can’t pick up the phone and extend Milan Hejduk for another year.

If he thinks there’s a solid core there, he’s probably not totally wrong, but at the same time, a great way to build around that is to make player transactions and offload some dead weight. That he didn’t do that, well, it underscores why he’s gonna get the axe this summer.

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I figured by now that I would be able to write a quick little blog about whatever trade had happened by noon or so, and get the hell outta here for the day and just check my phone a bunch. As you know by now, no dice.

As of 12:19 p.m. Eastern, there have been no trades. Not one. Not a single friggin’ trade. There’s nothing to analyze. Not that it’s stopped TSN from analyzing what might happen, because TSN is the worst.

There was a thing James Duthie said earlier in the day about how the average first trade in the last few years takes place around 10:25 a.m. or so. This did nothing to prevent his show from starting at 8 a.m., and they mostly talked about nothing for the two and a half hours before most even anticipated anything happening. Which tells you everything you need to know about this kind of crap coverage.

So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m just going to write what happens on TSN until I want to kill myself, then I’m going to stop. Here goes nothing.

They’re talking about the Canucks. And that means they’re talking about Roberto Luongo. Did you know he’s on the block? James Duthie just said Mike Gillis has been one of the “more busier” GMs on deadline day, so now there is an in-depth discussion of how he hasn’t called anyone and no one has really called him today. Farhan Lalji with the big scoop that Luongo is in the building for practice, because, you know, the team scheduled practice.

“We have a trade, and… kind of,” Gord Miller intones with something resembling enthusiasm for reasons I think I’ll never understand. It’s a minor-league deal: Max Sauve from Boston to Chicago for Rob Flick. If you’ve heard of them, get a life. “I don’t know that it’s worth analyzing,” Duthie says. He’s right. On Twitter, though, Darren Dreger gave this one four exclamation points.

More Canucks talk. Forward depth is an issue, they say, because everyone’s injured. Booth, Kesler, that guy I forget already. And now they’re talking about the Zack Kassian trade and how successful it wasn’t. Oh god it’s Pierre McGuire. This might be a very short post. After he talks about the Canucks’ power play issues, talk circles back to Luongo. He has a “gargantuan contract.” Good analysis here. Will there be a compliance buyout? Oh man this is rough.

Now they’re going to Ryane Clowe on the phone. He’s got nothinge to saye. Duthie asks if it’s hard to go to a team “you’ve been trained to hate” which is just about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Clowe isn’t sure why he doesn’t have more than no goals this season. “That happens sometimes,” he says. I mean I guess so, dude.

They go to commercial just as my desire to blow my brains out reaches its apex, but not before playing some hideous song on the way out. I’m not doing this any more.

But here’s the thing, right? This is literally all this show has been for four and a half hours at this point. I think TSN should mail checks to everyone (like me) dumb enough to watch this for so long. I have so much more I could have been doing with my life than seeing someone cut to Mike Milbury and Keith Jones like their opinions on who should go where, or anything really, are worth literally even hearing at this point. How do you get Milbury on TV during trade deadline day and not at least make fun of him for the Yashin thing. Like, that’s gotta be your logical bare minimum, right? Further proof that this show should be nuked from orbit.

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“Ah well,” people who believed Jay Feaster didn’t completely bungle the Jarome Iginla trade and totally embarrass himself and his organization in the process, “you can’t judge or blame him by this.”

Last week on Puck Daddy I broke down some of the many reasons you very much could blame Feaster for punting the Iginla deal, despite the player’s last-minute mind-change, but as I said then, those who would prop him up in this vague manner had half a point at the very least.

And hindsight being what it is, it’s now officially extremely easy to look back and giggle with schadenfreudian delight at the thing they often said next: “Let’s see how he handles the rest of this dismantling.”

Make no mistake about it: Iginla being traded signalled the long-awaited switch in managerial philosophy that no, this crap team wasn’t going to magically get good with the passage of time, and last night’s move of Jay Bouwmeester to St. Louis put an exclamation point behind that point. When or if they hopefully are able to unload Miikka Kiprusoff on anyone dumb enough to take him aboard it will also have been double-underlined and circled a few times, and have arrows drawn to it.

Those three have long been the standard bearers for the Flames’ appalling lack of intellectual honesty — that’s Feaster’s term, by the way, not mine — about the quality of their team, and to see two of them go now is no small miracle. The only hindrance to moving Kiprusoff, and this is on Feaster too, is that he’s now too old and bad to fetch much of a price, and also he doesn’t seem too amenable to going elsewhere given that his wife had a baby just a few weeks ago.

So okay, if we can’t judge Feaster on the return he pulled for Iginla, and we’re unlikely to get the chance to do so for a Kiprusoff deal, then the only lens through which we can view him with total clearheadedness is apparently the Bouwmeester trade. And he ate it hard, as Feaster is wont to do. (Ed. note: This was not originally intended as a fat joke, at least not consciously, but could certainly be viewed that way in hindsight.)

The return for what some see as a steady, 29-year-old defenseman with one year remaining on his contract (whose numbers might only look bad because he’s playing 30 minutes a night against the toughest competition the Flames see by far and is by the way on one of the worst teams in the league) was much the same as what Feaster pulled for a declining, 35-year-old forward who is a pure rental. Except for the fact that it was worse.

Where Iginla earned Feaster a return of two middling prospects with marginal chances to become NHL regulars as well as a late first-round pick, he didn’t even get that much out of St. Louis. Oh, the two middling prospects with marginal chances to become NHL regulars came, for sure. But that first-round pick? A bit muddier. They don’t get it if St. Louis misses the playoffs this season, and will instead have to settle for a fourth-rounder and whatever first-round position the Blues pull next year.

So yes, let’s judge Feaster by that: A far more desirable player than his captain, whom he could have moved to any team with the interest, couldn’t even fetch the same return. The reason for this is obvious, though. Other GMs know Feaster is horrible at his job and are looking to rob him blind at every turn. One of the pitfalls of being in open rebuild, I suppose, but when Douglas Murray and Robyn Regehr are fetching a pair of second-round picks, not even being able to get that much for someone who’s demonstrably better than both of them is a true sign of how bad this guy is at his job.

And of course, when considering just how dumb he is, one must also note that he actually said, perhaps in an attempt to save face, that this move frees up a lot of cap space for next season. Some people never learn, I guess.

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Yesterday I wrote about teams deluding themselves into being buyers because they’re so close to a playoff spot, and probably paying too-high prices for too-bad players, and sure enough, not a minute before I opened the window to write this post, Darren Dreger tweeted maybe the dumbest thing I’ve read in two weeks:

“CBJ will be a buyer. Columbus would be willing to part with 1 of their 3 first rnd draft picks for a scoring forward.”

A lot of questions come to mind in reading this. Like, “What?” and “Huh?” and “Why would they do that?” and “Seriously?” and “This is an April Fool’s joke, right?” and “No seriously Dreger, is it?” and “What do you mean it’s not?” and “Can you believe how stupid the Blue Jackets are?” and “Wait Scott Howson isn’t their GM any more?”

Tough to answer any of those questions, except maybe the last one. This seems an incredibly foolish tack to take, but on some level it’s an understandable one. This is a new management group, with John Davidson having been brought in over the summer and Jarmo Kekalainen just a few months into the job, and maybe they want to make a bit of splash by acquiring whatever will pass for a “big name” at this deadline — 682-year-old Jaromir Jagr? — and show fans they’re serious about competing for the playoffs. Columbus is already holding onto eighth in the West, but is just a point up on St. Louis, and the Blues have three games in hand.

Therefore, going out and getting someone certainly bolsters their chances for making the postseason, but here’s another question you should feel free to ask JD or Jarmo if you happen to bump into them: “To what end?” The Blue Jackets are third-to-last in goals scored league-wide, which is why they want forward help, but any team gripping as tightly as they are to that spot with their minus-10 goal differential isn’t going to find anyone anywhere worth enough to make them competitive. Remember that Chicago’s goal differential is currently plus-52 better than theirs, and then tell me why this willingness to deal is even remotely existent.

There’s a middle ground between trading a first-round pick for a rental, and selling. That’s standing pat, which most teams would probably be wise to do over the next two days or so. The focus for Columbus should be trying to get the best return possible for their efforts to sell off their good players (Rick Nash, Jeff Cater, etc.) by getting as many high first-round picks as they can, and while the Rangers are doing their best to accommodate those needs by being tied with the Islanders, Los Angeles and the Blue Jackets themselves are doing Kekalainen no favors. Trading one of those — you’d think it’d be the Kings’, but then you also don’t know just how intent they are on securing said scoring forward — seems remarkably ill-advised.

Yeah, the Blue Jackets have made the playoffs once since they existed, and they got swept out of the first round. So here’s one last question: “Don’t you think that a team with 37 points in 36 games probably suffers a similar fate against Chicago, even with this new and exciting forward?” The answer is yes.

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For whatever reason, it seems as if mediocre defensemen will dominate the trade market this year, and I don’t really know how much sense it makes. Jordan Leopold became the latest of these blueliners to get traded yesterday, moving to St. Louis for the absurdly high price of a second-round pick, just days after Douglas Murray got two out of Pittsburgh.

Is that the market? A mid-to-late second rounder for guys with little actual value and negative corsi relative numbers? Ridiculous. To put it another way, apparently the Blackhawks were in hot pursuit of Lubomir Visnovsky before the Islanders signed him to a big-money extension, and that’s because he has actually been good this year. But having been spurned, they will instead move onto other potential targets like Mark Streit (negative corsi), Robyn Regehr (negative corsi), Jay Bouwmeester (negative corsi), and Ryan Whitney (negative corsi).

It’s come to this, I guess. It seems unlikely that any of these players apart from Bouwmeester will actually help a team be good at hockey — this assumption is based on Bouwmeester largely enjoying a career offensive year despite an extremely low PDO, and playing heavy minutes against the toughest competition on the team for a mostly garbage club — but nonetheless, teams will be happy to pay extremely high prices for these guys. I can’t even begin to imagine what Bouwmeester fetches from whatever team is desperate enough to pay Calgary’s ransom, which will no doubt be boosted appreciably by the team trying to save face after getting robbed in the Iginla deal.

I have something going up on Puck Daddy tomorrow morning about how the market is largely going to be dead, and I believe that rather firmly. The only guys that are going to be moved are guys like Leopold and Murray, who are of little consequence, and whose former teams will be better for having moved them off their rosters. That’s even leaving aside whatever returns they fetch. Which again, seem to be considerable.

The trade deadline is almost by definition always a buyer’s market, and with so few sellers out there, the old adage about teams paying gallon prices for a quart of milk seem more likely to ring true now than not. But if the Blackhawks, or whoever, end up paying that for the defensemen being bandied about in the market these days, they’ll be getting closer to a pint.

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You’ll recall that the Detroit Red Wings used to be considered the gold standard among NHL teams in terms of being well-run and also being exceptionally good at the sport of hockey. These days, uhh, not so much.

The first and most obvious fact here is that the Red Wings sit just sixth in the Western Conference as of this writing, just a point up on disappointing San Jose, three up on St. Louis, and four ahead of Dallas, all of which have a game in hand on the team that seems to have been completely thrown off by the loss of Nicklas Lidstrom. I guess it’s understandable that you’d not be quite so good when you lose the second-best defenseman of all time, no matter how old he is, and also Brad Stuart and probably a few other guys too, and replace them with Carlo Colaiacovo and a rookie.

On the other hand, with Lidstrom’s retirement seems also to have come this very bizarre and almost inexplicable loss of whatever mojo the Wings once had as well. Just yesterday, Ken Holland — long one of the most beloved and seen-as-brilliant GMs in the league for reasons that border on the inexplicable — was saying how he doesn’t know what’s going to happen with Pavel Datsyuk come the summer, alluding to the potential of his bolting for the KHL after his deal expires in 2014 because at 34 he’s older than almost all of us probably think of him as being. The Ken Holland of, say, three years ago would have had that extension agreed-to in principle three years before that, and everyone would be laughing and happy about it the whole time.

Then there’s the fact that he’s considering trading Valtteri Filppula, who, like Datsyuk, is older than anyone probably considers him to be. He just turned 29 despite everyone in the league checking their watches and wondering if this season, this one right here, is the one in which he finally at long last breaks out and becomes a Datsyukian or Zetterbergian talent, which he never will. Will the Red Wings trade him at the deadline? Tough to say, but the fact that it’s even up for discussion is, again, indicative of some rather deep problems inherent in the way the team is run.

However, Holland did make one move yesterday that could reinforce his singular genius among those who don’t need to be sold on his singular genius. He signed NHL-ready NCAA free agent Danny DeKeyser to an NHL deal, beating back a pack of ravening GMs for the honor. People want to play for Detroit. People want to play for a winner. People want to play for Mike Babcock. Well, yes and no. The Red Wings also told DeKeyser he could start playing for their NHL club straightaway, which is a position in which most pundits would probably figure they’d see, say, Edmonton or Columbus, and not the mighty Winged Wheels for whom everyone has only the most endless of praise.

What ever happened to that Red Wing mystique? Being a mediocre team this late in the season is something you might be able to write off as being a result of the shortened schedule and some weird luck. Not knowing what’s going on with Pavel Datsyuk’s chances of leaving the continent is something you might be able to write off as being just one of those things with guys wanting to go home and make a crazy amount of money tax-free. Considering trading Valtteri Filppula before the deadline is something you might be able to write off as shrewd GMing if Holland doesn’t think he can re-sign the winger, but might also be a sign that they just don’t think they’ll be competitive. Roping in a sought-after college free agent is something you might be able to say is the result of Detroit being one of the most desirable destinations in hockey, but could just be because they don’t have any better options on the blue line.

It’s all very confusing and weird.

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I didn’t get a chance to write about this yesterday (Iginla trade, laughing at Phoenix, etc.) but it seems that Matt Cooke accidentally ripping through Erik Karlsson’s achilles tendon also had the added effect of separating Sens owner Eugene Melnyk from all reason or cognitive functions.

Melnyk is now in the midst of paying actual forensic investigators to prove definitively that Cooke ended Karlsson’s season intentionally. Which he certainly did not. Actual forensic doctors have already weighed in and said things about how there’s probably no way to judge intent in an injury like this. But to be fair, there’s no way the guys or gals who took Melnyk’s money to conduct such a study were going to pass up the likely-minimal-work-for-big-payday job this eccentric whose pharmaceutical company was once investigated by the SEC was all too eager to hand out in his righteous quest for satisfaction from the villain Matt Cooke who hasn’t done anything particularly villainous in a few years now.

And the rant in which he revealed this investigative intent sounded like someone reading a manifesto aloud. How much force would it take to have a skate blade go through a sock, a “sub-sock” (whatever that is), then skin, then muscle, then sheath, THEN tendon? Well yes, Eugene, that’s how cuts work. You didn’t need to hire anyone from the cast of CSI: Miami to tell you that. And as to actually answering the question, I would guess that the answer is something along the lines of “about as much force as is generated by a 200-pound man with little knives attached to his feet stepping downwards as he would normally.” That’s probably about approximately roughly more or less exactly the right amount. Unless Karlsson has about four inches of sheath over his tendon, in which case let’s throw Matt Cooke in jail forever.

As if Jeremy Jacobs spending more than half a million dollars on municipal elections in some craphole richboy town in Florida didn’t provide us with enough evidence that North America’s super-rich have too much time and money on their hands, as well as an almost uncanny ability to hold petty grudges and behave like spoiled children. You know who else was sad to see Erik Karlsson go down for the season? Hockey fans. It’s fun and great to watch him play, and the NHL is poorer for having lost him for the year. But this? It’s beyond stupid. Obviously. Goes without saying. That Melnyk would even deign to waste anyone’s time with this, let alone league officials, while his team is pretty comfortably in a playoff spot, shows just how far up his own ass this guy has his head stuck.

Just imagine the outcry if Mario Lemieux had done something similar with Sidney Crosby’s first concussion, opening a Jim Garrison-style investigation into David Steckel and highlighting how Crosby’s head moved back and to the left on impact. That would have added a crazy amount of fuel to the fire about how much the Penguins whine to the league when something doesn’t go their way, and for once, that fuel would have been rooted in truth and not jealous perception.

None of that for Melnyk though. Mainly because he’s already widely regarded as a joke.

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Lost in all the Jarome Iginla-related madness of last night was a leak from league marionnette/insider Darren Dreger, who noted that the NHL will likely make a decision about the Coyotes’ future before the playoffs start.

This, to me, seemed like the slightly more surprising news of the night, though perhaps it’s important to note that it was also far less fraught with drama. Iginla was always going to get traded, though to have had so many balls in the air at once in the final hours was a little surprising. The Phoenix saga, though, looked like it could have gone on forever and ever in perpetuity for two reasons:

1) The NHL clearly wants this market to work so, so, so badly.

2) Glendale seems more than happy to shovel millions of dollars onto the fire to keep the team there for reasons no one seems all that clear on.

But now maybe, just maybe, Phoenix is out. Unless they can get a buyer to keep them there before the playoffs start toward the end of April. Which they so obviously will not that even keeping up the pretense seems laughable.

S o where could this team up and move to as soon as this summer? Kansas City, Quebec City, and Seattle (no City). Those all make some amount of sense, probably not in that order though. Kansas City seems the biggest longshot, Quebec the most probable, and Seattle the sexiest for the league but not necessarily the best fit. The argument against Kansas City is that it’s an unproven market that has been trying for years to generate interest in a team to no avail. The argument against Seattle is they don’t have a rink yet. The argument against Quebec City is the NHL doesn’t want any more god damn teams in Canada and also it would make realignment even worse than it already is.

Then again, there’s rumors — of which I buy none — that Ice Edge could be trying to wade back into the waters and make something work in Phoenix, which seems a fool’s errand at best and the potential to be a nuclear-level disaster at worst, and I’d be inclined to lean far more toward the latter.

This is all perfectly logical stuff. No one give’s a heckaroo about the Coyotes in Phoenix, and the good people of Quebec City would sure like to see NHL hockey; using the Winnipeg model of success, getting any team, even if it’s the Thrashers, into a smaller market with a diminutive rink is a license to print money. Which seems to me, from a business standpoint, to be preferable to throwing it down a hole and hoping all the stacks of bills one day end up being high enough that people are at least impressed by that.

But then I’m not Gary Bettman and I didn’t insist on keeping a team in Phoenix even as it drew like 6,000 people a night, or try to unload the team to a snake-oil salesman who wears bad suits and wouldn’t reveal any of his shadowy, possibly-nonexistent “investors.” So what do I know?

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The Maple Leafs are, as I’ve said before, not a particularly great hockey team, nor are they a particularly well-managed or well-coached hockey team. But I did think they were good enough to get into the playoffs if their goaltending held up.

It largely has. And as a result, the Leafs are currently sitting sixth in the East, seven points up on the Islanders, who are just below the postseason cutoff, and they’re looking pretty comfortable, even if they have won just three of their last 10 games (yuck). How comfortable? James Mirtle tweeted this morning that by his count, because the Leafs currently have 40 points and the rest of the East sucks, that the Leafs can go just 5-7-2 in their remaining 14 games and be more or less assured a playoff spot.

Which is crazy. They’ve almost done everything in their power to not make the playoffs, including playing their worst players more minutes than one of the best point-producing and possession-driving centers in the league this season, leaving a high-quality offensive defenseman in the AHL in favor of Korbinian Holzer, and been absolute crap in the shootout. But it’s all been to no avail.

The Leafs are probably going to make the playoffs. They’d need to collapse way more significantly than they did last season, and in 14 games that doesn’t seem all that likely, especially given how soft their schedule is. In all, 10 of their remaining games are against teams below them in the standings, including the Hurricanes (bad), Flyers (worse), Devils twice (okayish I guess), Rangers twice (still underperforming), Islanders twice (dreadful), Capitals (woof), Lightning (crap), and Panthers (the worst).

I can’t be too sure whether lot of people will try to paint this as somehow being a result of their canning Brian Burke being the reason that the Leafs are actually good enough to make the playoffs finally, but I’m going to err on the side of caution and say they obviously will. Only a person like Burke saying that he set the table for the Leafs’ moderate success this likely playoff season — not coincidentally the only one in which James Reimer has been remotely healthy in the last three — would be viewed as being some sort of derogatory misrepresentation of fact. But what has Dave Nonis done this season? Anything of note besides strand Jake Gardiner in the minors for too long? The answer is nothing. That’s it.

So it seems like at long last Toronto is going to have its playoff team. Which is probably something it should or even would have done last season. But moreover it looks like people in the media up there might have to actually say moderately nice things about the things Brian Burke has done in constructing this team and maybe even setting it up for the future. Either that or it’ll take some serious logical acrobatics to avoid doing so. That’s the really mind-blowing thing about all this.

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Alexander Semin at $7 million this season is looking like a pretty good gamble for the Carolina Hurricanes, because he’s on 26 points in 24 games and really carrying the load offensively to help Eric Staal and Jiri Tlusty look good.

Alexander Semin at $7 million next season, and the one after that, and the one after that, and the one after that, and the one after that probably isn’t going to be quite as good a gamble, because the ENIGMATIC Russian forward, while very good, is also 29 years old and will be 34 when this contract expires. Apart from wondering how much of this production was the result of his playing for a contract and all that stuff after a weakish final two seasons in Washington, you also have to wonder what the actual heckaroonie Jim Rutherford is thinking with how he approaches the makeup of his roster.

Up front, he is now giving Eric Staal $8.25 million, Semin $7 million, Jordan Staal $6 million, Jeff Skinner $5.725 million, and Tuomo Ruutu $4.75 million against the cap starting next season, and all are signed through at least 2015-16. On top of that, mediocre goalie Cam Ward’s $6.3 million cap hit extends through that season as well.

What you’ll notice there is that five of the six highest-paid guys on the Hurricanes are forwards, and perhaps only Skinner is really going to be worth the cap hit he carries three years from now. Both Staals probably already aren’t. Ward (not a forward) also isn’t.

Altogether those contracts are worth a combined $38-plus million against a cap coming in at $64.3 million next year. You’ll notice, by the way, that none of these contracts begin to address Carolina’s real problem, which is that their defense isn’t very good. Joni Pitkanen and Tim Gleason, at $4.5 million and $4 million, respectively, are the highest-paid defenders on the team. The former is good but not great, and probably plays more minutes than he should because of how bad his counterparts are. The latter plays less than 20 minutes a night for a reason.

Ah, but there’s Justin Faulk and Jamie McBain to consider on the blue line, and though Faulk is the best defender on the team, McBain is also pretty good, and both are due raises from their RFA contracts in summer 2015, when all the above guys are still on the books save for Pitkanen and Tlusty, whose contracts expire at the same time. Admittedly the cap will likely have gone up by then, but Tlusty, McBain and Faulk are all likely to be due sizable raises coming off these RFA deals in which they played very well. Where does the money come from?

More immediately, though, is that Rutherford put Jussi Jokinen, one of the team’s better forwards, on waivers for reasons unbeknownst to rational thought. Sure, Jokinen’s goal and point totals aren’t great, but at just $3 million and with his underlying numbers, he’s going to be a bargain for whoever claims him by this time tomorrow. That clears out $3 million against the cap this summer, sure, but the team still has just over $9 million in space with 16 players under contract. Where do you get seven useful players for $9 million?

Those are problems good teams can worry about, one supposes, but the Hurricanes are, you’ll recall, not a good team. They’re currently ninth in the East, though only a point back of the Rangers, who are a very good team that is just underperforming significantly for reasons no one seems to understand.

It’s very difficult to wrap one’s head around why Rutherford is so intent on getting rid of useful players and also signing strange long-term deals that prevent him from adding more who will actually help his team make the playoffs for the first time in what will soon be four years. But then I haven’t been an NHL general manager since 1994.

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