A life-changing phone call: What it’s like being traded on Deadline Day

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Less than one week to go. We’ve been counting down to the NHL’s March 3 trade deadline for the last two months at Daily Faceoff with at least one trade-focused story every day leading up to Deadline Day.

Today, former NHL goaltender Mike McKenna puts you inside a player’s skates. What’s it like to be an NHLer on Trade Deadline day?

2023 Trade Deadline countdown: 5 days

For a professional hockey player, being traded – whether you know it’s coming or not – is a gut punch. Your world stops spinning. Time slows down. You immediately feel detached and lost.

Some players get over those feelings quicker than others. If you’re walking into a good situation – a desirable location or a winning team – life brightens up pretty quickly. But it can also go the other direction. I’ve seen players become absolutely miserable in their new surroundings.

As hockey players, we’re human. We’re not impervious to emotion. But I do think we’ve become conditioned to change. And in the long run, that helps us adapt to almost any situation.

Twice during my 14-year career I was traded. But what’s pretty wild is that I went 11 seasons without it happening. I made it so far into my career without being dealt that I was almost convinced it wouldn’t happen.

For me, it felt like a feather in my cap. That I was valuable enough for my team to want to keep me around. But it also could have been taken in a different sense: that I wasn’t good enough for a team to need me in the postseason.

That all changed on March 1, 2017, during my 12th year as a pro, when the Florida Panthers traded me to the Tampa Bay Lightning in exchange for fellow goaltender Adam Wilcox.

It was a one-for-one deal involving minor leaguers, but it carried big implications. I knew Tampa Bay wanted me for their AHL affiliate Syracuse Crunch – a team that I’d had plenty of success against previously.

The Lightning, under GM Steve Yzerman and his assistant, Julien BriseBois, had always put an emphasis on winning at the AHL level. And the Crunch were gearing up for a run at the Calder Cup.

I wasn’t surprised that Syracuse added a goaltender. But me? That came as a shock.

We weren’t having a great season with the Springfield Thunderbirds – Florida’s AHL affiliate at the time. And I was sharing the crease with Reto Berra. He had a one-way contract. I didn’t. So the deck was already stacked against me, and to make matters worse, my year started slowly.

I couldn’t buy wins. But I never felt off from a technical standpoint. And as the year progressed, my luck started to turn. Wins started to come, followed by a shutout. My numbers improved.

Despite my renewed success in the crease, I didn’t think there was any chance I’d be traded. All season long the Panthers had been telling my agent that they were trying to move Berra. If anything, I thought he would be the one to go.

Nope. In my 12th year pro, with a .907 save percentage and measly 9-10-7 AHL record, I was sent from a team in Springfield that was outside of the Calder Cup playoffs to one in Syracuse that was a contender.

It turned out to be a great trade. I started all 22 games during the postseason for Syracuse. And despite losing to the Grand Rapids Griffins in Game 6 of the Calder Cup Final, the run reinvigorated my career.

The end result was better than I could have ever imagined. And I’m forever thankful to the Lightning organization for believing in me. But the best part of the story isn’t how it turned out on the ice. It’s how the actual trade went down.

Flashback to Feb. 28, 2017, the day before the deadline. I’d just installed a homemade baby gate in front of the stairs of the place we were renting in Enfield, Connecticut. And I was really proud of this thing. I used a bunch of broken hockey sticks and hardware that I found laying around the rink.

Truthfully, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the baby gate when the year was over. But that didn’t matter at the time. I just needed to keep my youngest daughter off the stairs. And store bought gates weren’t the right size. It was a fun in-season project.

Anyway.

We had a road game the next day against the Hartford Wolfpack. And like I said before, I was sure I wouldn’t be traded. So I went to bed feeling at ease.

The next day I went to our morning skate like usual. No worries on my end. But have you ever walked into a room and immediately felt a weird vibe? That’s what trade deadline day is like in a professional locker room. Things can get weird. And fast.

I can’t remember if I was supposed to start or back up that night. But I do remember making it through the practice and feeling relieved that nothing seismic had happened regarding our team. We may not have been winning a lot, but we were having fun. I don’t think anyone wanted to ruin the chemistry.

So I got home just ahead of the 3:00 p.m. ET trade deadline and started preparing my pregame meal just like any other game day. The clock was up. Time had passed. Trade deadline was over.

Or so I thought.

Just as I was nuking a plate of leftovers – my usual pregame meal – my phone went off. It was almost 4:00 p.m. ET – nearly an hour past the trade deadline. And on the other end of the line was our Thunderbirds GM, Eric Joyce.

In that exact moment, it felt like every drop of blood had drained from my body. I took a deep breath and answered the phone, knowing full well what was coming.

Joyce confirmed my suspicion: the teflon had worn off. I’d been traded for the first time. It went down at the last minute and took a while to get through the NHL system – something I hadn’t considered previously. I thought for sure that if I’d been traded, someone would have tipped me off before the deadline.

It was the biggest shock of my career. I wasn’t prepared – not that anyone ever truly is. But what came next was a lot to process. I had to go back to the rink and pack up my equipment, then say goodbye to coaches and teammates.

But the hardest part was trying to formulate a plan for my family. Our two children were under the age of five and thankfully not in school yet. But the logistics were almost overwhelming. I was needed in Syracuse that night – with a game the next day.

Somehow we got it all worked out. It took a few trips back to Connecticut to get all of our possessions, and my wife had to do most of the packing. Which brought an added layer of guilt on my end.

But what I remember most about the next few days was simply how lost I felt. I’d walked into countless locker rooms before when I was called up from the minors to the NHL. And that felt strange enough, despite staying within an organization.

Changing AHL teams mid-season was really odd. New coaches. New systems. New teammates. New equipment. New housing. Everything.

It took the better part of a month before I finally felt comfortable in my new surroundings. I found out quickly who I could lean on. And the Crunch did everything possible to make my family at home once they arrived in Syracuse a few weeks after the trade went down.

There were times that I’d just shake my head, wondering what I’d gotten myself into all those years ago when I chose to pursue hockey professionally. People in other fields don’t get traded mid-day from one office to another hundreds of miles away.

But you know what? I wouldn’t change it for the world. Hockey was my chosen path, but like my 2016-17 season, sometimes the path chooses you.

So as the March 3 NHL trade deadline approaches, keep in mind how stressful it is for the players. I know they don’t get a lot of sympathy purely due to their income. But from my own experience, I can guarantee you that money doesn’t fix emotions.

The moral of the story is this: when the boss calls, be ready. Because anything can happen.

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A life-changing phone call: What it’s like being traded on Deadline Day

2023 Trade Deadline countdown: 5 days

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