DFO Roundtable: Which trade-deadline deal shocked you the most?

The 2022 NHL trade deadline is a week from Monday, and Daily Faceoff ramped up its coverage this week. Frank Seravalli updated his Trade Targets board and broke down the goaltending market; Matt Larkin named his top 10 deadline deals of the salary-cap era; and Chris Peters explored which prospects are in play as trade chips. Our Roundtable this week keeps the momentum going.

Of all the trades you remember from deadline day over the years, which one surprised you the most the moment it happened?

FRANK SERAVALLI: From a pure insider standpoint, the Detroit Red Wings trading Anthony Mantha to Washington in exchange for Jakub Vrana last April was easily the biggest jawdropper. First off, the trade was first reported at 3:28 pm, well after the deadline had expired. It was never on anyone’s radar. There was not a whisper, a hint, a peep – nothing – about the Wings and Caps being engaged in talks. The trade clearly just made it into the NHL Central Registry queue prior to the actual deadline. And it was a good, old-fashioned hockey trade, too. It was a whopper. Mantha for Vrana, Richard Panik, plus first- and second-round picks. No one really had any inkling that Mantha or Vrana was even available, or that this was something the two teams had been working on for a while. It’s still a little bit of a mystery how it all came together and, because we weren’t on the scent, I tell myself that it’s just something that materialized in the last few hours.

SCOTT BURNSIDE: Even though it’s been four years since the Vegas Golden Knights opened up the vault for Tomas Tatar, it remains a wholly mystifying transaction. The expansion Golden Knights had all kinds of assets, and they were on an historic run that would see them advance to the 2018 Stanley Cup final, so adding some veteran scoring made sense. Except it turned out to be a ghastly mistake. After Vegas gave up a first-round pick in 2018, a second in 2019 and a third in 2021 to Detroit for a guy that had never scored 30 goals and never hit the 60-point plateau, Tatar quickly became an afterthought in Vegas. In spite of arriving with the second-highest cap hit on the team after netminder Marc-Andre Fleury, Tatar scored just four goals and collected six points in 20 regular-season games. Those turned out to be the salad days for Tatar in Vegas. In the post-season he played in just eight contests, adding a single goal and one assist in eight games. By the following September ,Tatar was gone, shipped to Montreal along with Nick Suzuki for former Hab captain Max Pacioretty.

MATT LARKIN: My pick is a weird one: Cory Conacher for Ben Bishop in 2013. Nothing about the trade made sense for me in the moment. Conacher was playing on the Tampa Bay Lightning’s top line for much of that season and was on the fringe of the Calder Trophy discussion – during a weak year for rookies in which Jonathan Huberdeau won it with 31 points in 48 games. I was surprised to see Tampa punt Conacher in the middle of his breakout year. Consequently, across 23 games over parts of two seasons with the Sens, Bishop had a .917 save percentage and showed the ability to become a long-term starter in the NHL. The deal worked out great for Tampa – nice job by then-GM Steve Yzerman selling high on the former AHL MVP Conacher – but I didn’t understand it for either team as a mid-season deal. Both players were just getting started on their teams.

CHRIS GEAR: I’ll stay on Matt’s Ben Bishop theme and say it was the deal a few years later that sent Bishop the other way. At the 2017 deadline, Tampa Bay traded Bishop to the L.A. Kings for Peter Budaj and prospect Erik Cernak. There was also a pick swap involved, with the Lightning sending a fifth-rounder to the Kings and taking back a seventh-rounder. If I knew then that Andrei Vasilevsky would soon become the best goalie in the NHL and that Erik Cernak would become an excellent top-four, right-shot defenseman, the trade would have made perfect sense. At the time, though, I remember being very surprised that the Lightning would move their two-time Vezina Trophy finalist goaltender – the guy that had helped them to the Stanley Cup final less than 24 months earlier – in exchange for an older Budaj and a Slovakian prospect. Suffice it to say that worked out pretty well for the Bolts.

MIKE MCKENNA: That’s easy for me. The most shocking deal was the only time I was ever moved at the trade deadline! It was 2017 and I was playing for the Springfield Thunderbirds, the AHL affiliate of the Florida Panthers. We weren’t very good, and I’d been battling Reto Berra for starts all season long. He was on a one-way contract and I wasn’t, so you can imagine how that went. Anyway, it was getting close to the trade deadline and I didn’t expect anything to happen. I’d gone the previous 11 seasons of my career without being traded. But there was still the usual nervousness because you never know what’s going to happen. So noon eastern time came and went, and I figured I was safe. Nothing to worry about. And then I got a phone call about an hour later from Eric Joyce, who at the time was the Assistant General Manager of the Florida Panthers. I’d been traded to the Tampa Bay Lightning, and I was expected to report to the Syracuse Crunch the next day. To say I was shocked would be a colossal understatement. My numbers weren’t even very good. Why would anyone be trading for a bum like me? It turned out to be one of the best things to happen in my career. Our team in Syracuse lost to the Grand Rapids Griffins in Game 6 of the Calder Cup final.