Deadline Day – Deal 7: Jeff Halpern to Los Angeles

Trade:

Los Angeles gets: Jeff Halpern

Tampa Bay gets: Teddy Purcell and a 3rd Round Pick

Analysis:

The moment this broke it was unknown what was coming back from Los Angeles and the Kings landing Halpern is a great move for them as he’s a great penalty killer and face off man. Perfect depth move for a team looking to make a big run in the playoffs.

Giving up Teddy Purcell and a 3rd Rounder to do it is a bit of a price though. Purcell is young, has some offensive talent but was buried on the third and fourth lines for the Kings the last two years. In Tampa, he’ll get a chance to play more offensive minutes and have room to grow. This deal could work out well for both teams and it gets my stamp of mutual approval.

Deadline Day – Deal 6: Colorado-Phoenix

Trade:

Phoenix trades: Forwards Peter Mueller and Kevin Porter

Colorado trades: Wojtek Wolski

Analysis:

Two potential (likely) playoff teams trading off headaches. For Colorado, they add a couple of offensive players who might strongly benefit from a change of scenery. Mueller’s offensive potential is high but he’s struggled a ton in Phoenix the last couple years. Kevin Porter is a former Hobey Baker Award winner with the University of Michigan who could be a dynamic scorer if given the opportunity. Dave Tippett’s arrival in Phoenix basically closed the door on Porter (and Mueller, really) getting  a chance to flex their offensive talents.

As for Wolski, he started off the season hot for the Avalanche and while he’s cooled off a bit, he can make plays and score and the Coyotes needed someone to take Scottie Upshall’s spot in the lineup since he went down with an injury.  Wolski has speed and he’s young and he’s got a good touch with the puck.

This is a real, actual hockey trade with real actual NHL players involved. This is a deal that could shake out as great and even in the future or could look bad on Colorado if Mueller and Porter can’t shake the Phoenix funk off.

Deadline Day – Deal 5: Scott Walker to Washington

Trade:

Carolina sends forward Scott Walker to the Washington Capitals for a 7th Round pick

Analysis:

The Capitals add a depth forward with playoff experience and a sandpaper game to their lineup.  He’s not being brought to the Capitals to score and be a power forward, he’s there to be a force in the locker room… And to an unsuspecting opposition defenseman’s face.

This is the Capitals way of loading up for the grueling playoff run and this will help out.

Deadline Day – Deal 4: Aaron Ward to Anaheim

Trade:

Carolina trades defenseman Aaron Ward to Anaheim for goalie Justin Pogge and a 4th Round Pick

Analysis:

Anaheim gets a tough defenseman with tons of playoff experience.  Carolina gets a minor league journeyman goaltender with unfulfilled potential and a draft pick for their trouble.

This trade could be more important for Anaheim if they make another move later today as is rumored they might do.

Deadline Day – Deal 3: Boston & Florida

Trade:

Florida gets: Forwards Craig Weller, Byron Bitz, 2nd Round Pick

Boston gets: Defensemen Dennis Seidenberg, Matt Bartkowski (sophomore – Ohio State)

Analysis:

Boston gets a better defensive defenseman in Seidenberg as he’s a shot blocking freak. So they’ve got that going for them.  They hand off a bunch of blue collar spare parts in Weller and Bitz and the Bruins have draft picks to throw away and they do that here handing off a 2nd rounder to the Panthers.

Seidenberg will help out from a defensive stand point but the Bruins main issue is goal scoring and Seidenberg isn’t helping there. Expect another move or two still for Boston.

Deadline Day – Deal 2: Martin Skoula to New Jersey

Trade:

Toronto sends Martin Skoula to New Jersey for a 2010 5th round pick.

Analysis:

Toronto acquired Skoula from Pittsburgh last night as part of the Alexei Ponikarovsky deal, a salary dump player for the Penguins. Toronto had no room for Skoula as it was and they weren’t going to hang on to him anyways.  New Jersey gets a puck moving defenseman that head coach Jacques Lemaire knows very well and likes a lot. New Jersey could use some NHL-experienced depth at defense so the deal makes perfect sense for both sides.

Nothing really to see here, move along.

Deadline Day – Deal 1: Derek Morris to Phoenix

Trade:

Boston sends Derek Morris to Phoenix for a 2011 4th round pick.

Analysis:

This deal clears out salary space for Boston to make more moves later today.  Depending on how the rest of the day and season goes for Boston, the signing of Morris at the beginning of the year will call into question the wisdom of Bruins GM Peter Chiarelli signing Morris (and others) to such fat contracts while letting the team’s only goal scorer twist in the wind and eventually get traded.

We’ll see how this pans out the rest of the day for Boston, clearly they’re angling to just get into the playoffs and hope to get hot. Of course they could be setting up to face either Pittsburgh or Washington so picking one’s poison might not be so awesome here.

NHL Trade Deadline – A Hockey Fan’s Internet Keg Party

It’s March 3rd and it’s NHL Trade Deadline Day.  Come 3pm Eastern time, everyone in the NHL will have decided whether they’re going all in or selling off and cashing in until next year or figuring they’ve got the horses to keep going through the playoffs… Or they just don’t want to bone over their own future.

So many possibilities.  So many opportunities.  So many futures with the potential to be vastly improved or irreparably destroyed.  If anything else, I’d say it’s like sitting around watching and waiting to see if a tsunami was going to hit a major metropolitan area and wipe it off the face of the map.

Too soon?

Who is in and who is out? Those are the questions today and all morning and afternoon it’s going to be talked about over at Hockey Independent starting at 9 AM, bright and early with a live chat show.  XM Home Ice personalities are jumping in, assorted sports writers are jumping in, blogger psychos like Face Off Hockey Show’s Scotty Wazz are jumping in… It’s just enough to bring a tear to my eye if I wasn’t a cold-hearted son of a bitch.

Come for the trade breakdowns and information, stay for the warm fuzzies your host B.D. Gallof will give you as he plays the part of ringmaster to this hockey circus.

As for what’s going on here, as deals come down, I’ll post them and give my instant snap judgment on who wins and loses.  Yeah, I’ll be flying by the seat of my pants… If I opt to even wear pants that is.  See, things just got way more sexy.

ECAC Standings: So How’d I Do?

To show that I can do a little bit of follow up work, it’s time to check in and see how I did ranking out the ECAC.  As I let it known back in September, I was one of the media members asked to give my pre-season rankings on how I thought the ECAC would turn out.  For reflection’s sake, here’s how I had the twelve team league ranked out:

1. Yale
2. Princeton
3. Cornell
4. Harvard
5. St. Lawrence
6. Dartmouth
7. RPI
8. Clarkson
9. Union
10. Quinnipiac
11. Colgate
12. Brown

I stood by those rankings then with the qualifier being that the ECAC is so tight in the middle of the pack that places in the standings could flip or flop in any way possible. I even toyed with the idea of drawing those teams from a hat and letting fate decide things for me. While that may have been “reckless” of a journalist to do, I’m just some hoser on the Internet with a website.

Anyhow, the ECAC wrapped up conference play this past weekend setting stage for the start of the conference playoffs on Friday.  Here’s how the standings wrapped up:

1. Yale
2. Cornell
3. Union
4. Colgate
5. St. Lawrence
6. RPI
7. Quinnipiac
8. Princeton
9. Harvard
10. Dartmouth
11. Brown
12. Clarkson

So let’s compare things and see where I went brutally wrong.  First up, the reasonably accurate assessments.

I had Yale set to win the ECAC, and they did. So did everyone else who was polled. Big deal. Yale was the defending conference champions and while they had (note: still have) questions in goal, they’re still a very good team but not one that is unbeatable by any means. They have a world of offensive talent and I sometimes believe that they’d rather get into a Firewagon hockey showdown with their opponent rather than try to play the chess match.

I had Cornell slated for third and they finished second, and for these purposes I’ll give a one place off proximity victory. Like I said on Puck Daddy weeks ago, you know what you’re going to get from Cornell and it’s going to frustrate the living hell out of you. Consistency like that is a rarity in the ECAC and it’s a good reason why Cornell always floats to the top of the conference. Missing them by a spot isn’t a big deal, although compared to who I had slated to finish second… Perhaps I deserve a slap in the back of the head.  We’ll get there soon enough, don’t worry.

For the 5-12 spots I managed to get St. Lawrence correctly at fifth and was one spot off with both RPI and Brown. Everyone else? Forget it. I missed terribly on Union College and really missed badly with Colgate. I overshot badly on Harvard, Clarkson and Dartmouth.  Screw it, I got more than half of these badly wrong. When you look at how the coaches ranked things out, I guess I don’t feel quite so bad. The coaches whiffed badly on St. Lawrence but all knew something was amiss with Clarkson, probably something to do with an off-ice scandal involving players set to provide depth for the Golden Knights.

So what do we gather from all this? A couple of things. One, the coaches will always know a little bit better about some of these things than the media (filed under: No shit, Sherlock).  Also, the ECAC is so close to being in full parity mode that the pre-season polls are rather meaningless and function solely as a dick-measuring contest. I don’t say that spitefully because I missed so horribly, it’s just how it goes.

Thankfully college hockey is a different beast than say… College football whose pre-season polls serve to set the bar (unfairly) for everyone else the rest of the season.  At least with college hockey you can hash things out a bit clearer over the course of a regular season and the methodology that goes into picking the NCAA Tournament field is a bit more mathematically centered so the amount of complaining at the end of the conference tournaments is kept to a minimum and the smokey room selection process is virtually non-existent.

As for the ECAC Playoffs, the matchups set up like this:

Yale, Cornell, Union and Colgate all get byes in the first round.

• #5 St. Lawrence vs. #12 Clarkson
• #6 RPI vs. #11 Brown
• #7 Quinnipiac v. #10 Dartmouth
• #8 Princeton v. #9 Harvard

The First Round and subsequent Quarterfinal round are played in the Best of Three format. When action shifts to the Times Union Center for the semis and finals, it’s single elimination time. The Best of Three rounds also mean games can go to overtime and take as many overtimes as needed to get a winner, just like the NHL Playoffs, and can create fascinating scenarios because the games are all played from Friday-Sunday. If you get a game with multiple overtimes, those teams could be back out on the ice the next night/later that day to play the next game.

As for predictions for how the playoffs will go, I’ll leave it up to a known movie expert to handle that for me.

Would you expect any better from me after I was able to guess two out of twelve teams in their spot in the standings correctly? I know when I’ve been beaten.

In truth though, each of these first round meetings set up interesting perspective. SLU and Clarkson are bitter rivals and that rivalry can’t be taken lightly as the series record between the two teams this season is 1-1-1. Brown and RPI split their two meetings this year. Quinnipiac and Dartmouth are equally schizophrenic. Princeton and Harvard each have boatloads of talent but lack on killer instinct and consistency.  Your guess is as good as mine, but if you want to use last year’s playoffs as a measuring stick, expect upsets.  Last year’s 11 and 12 seeds both won their first round playoff series after both of those teams (RPI and Brown) had miserable regular seasons but defeated their opponents (Dartmouth and Harvard) in two games.  Brown even managed to shutout Harvard in both games to pile on to the stunning results.

Fortunately for the top four seeds, they’ve seen everyone in conference enough this season to have good scouting reports and if the seeds hold, it sets up well for some teams to have more than enough of a book on their potential quarterfinal opponent. For example, Union could face RPI in the next round, a team they’ve played four times already this year. That’s still a long way off though and, as the ECAC is getting to be well known for, nothing is guaranteed in the playoffs.

Dear Gary…

All right Gary, you and I have had it out. You’re probably blissfully unaware of this but it’s true. For the better part of over 15 years you’ve been trying to figure out a way to grow the popularity of hockey in America and you’ve been a brutal, miserable, egotistical maniac of a failure in doing so.

Eight years ago you had your two home countries in Canada and the United States facing off with your NHL talent in the Olympics for the gold medal in Salt Lake City.  Two years after that, after failing to seize attention of the masses in spite of having the games in the United States and basically getting your run of the schedule, you and the owners locked out the players looking to find a way to secure finances for your pack of rich idiots over those ever-greedy players.

Of course, you didn’t do a good enough job of that and people are already grumbling about future labor strife. You cut a cable deal after the lockout with a loser network while simultaneously giving the finger to ESPN for treating the lockout like a joke, spending every minute talking about it cutting jokes and laughing at how completely stupid you, the owners and the players all looked.

Fast forward to today.  The USA and Canada play in what was one of the greatest gold medal games of all time (no hyperbole here), an overtime thriller that saw Canada win 3-2, that featured your hand-picked golden calf score the game winner in overtime. I’m sure this left you twinged with strife because while Sidney Crosby is your boy and he plays for an American feel-good-story team in Pittsburgh… He’s Canadian. I’m sure that getting your new and gigantic NBC hockey watching audience instantly disliking the guy you want to be the face to the league is driving you mad but you don’t care because all you’re seeing now is dollar signs of opportunity.

I mean, hey why not? A balls-out crazy game featuring the United States tying the game with under 30 seconds to play is damn dramatic and any game that ends in overtime (you hear that, in overtime) is thrilling. Thankfully the IIHF does things the right way when it comes to overtime and allows the game to be settled on the ice and not in a shootout.  I know shootouts made Peter Forsberg a legend in Sweden and sunk Corey Hirsch’s career but let’s get real here.

I’m straying from the point here though. The point being that, once again, the NHL has a golden opportunity to seize the interest of the American mass audience they desire so much. They screwed the pooch in 2002, they screwed it even harder in the 1994-1995 season when the New York Rangers had won the cup in 1994 and got the attention of the entire country… Only to see the owners lock the players out the following season and play a shortened schedule in the 1994-1995 season.

People want to know when Gary Bettman’s moment is going to be and we’re all still waiting for it to happen (if it ever will) and while this tournament has provided thrills and excitement all over the place, Bettman was continually asked about what would happen in 2014 in Sochi, Russia which gave him a grand platform to play politics with the IOC, IIHF and the NHL Players Association.  He gave nothing away in his answers and essentially said, “We’ll get to that when we’re good and ready to.” Admit to nothing, never tip your hand, make everyone wait it out.  You know, that’s the whole thing in the NHL’s hand in the Versus/DirecTV dispute too (which is still unsettled) – play no favorites, say it’s not your fight (yet) and allow everyone to do what they need to do without really getting your hands dirty.

Of course when NBC is pulling the strings for what games they want to show you’re going to bow to their will since they’re such a tremendous broadcast partner for the NHL and hockey in general. Lord knows fans out in the mountain and pacific time zones are happy to have watched  Olympic games on tape delay.  Since, you know, people will always tune in when they already know what happened.  Then again, perhaps NBC is just setting us up for the future of the NHL where it’s like how the NBA was treated in the 1970s when the NBA Finals were televised… Whenever they felt like putting it on the air.  Maybe since NBC saw how great the ratings for the Olympics were regardless of whether events were actually live or not, they’ll apply this to all of their sports properties. Nevermind that games could be shifted to occur live, they can just have them happen whenever and if it turns out to be really good they’ll just hype the shit out of it and put it in prime time in a nice, convenient, commercial-friendly package.

I’m making myself dumber for just ranting off like this Gary because this is what you’ve done to the hardcore hockey fans.

You’ve abused and taken full advantage of them at all times. Whether it’s a shitty cable network, a shitty national broadcast partner, obnoxiously high ticket prices in many cities, a shitty jersey deal with a company that want to soak fans for more money or any host of other issues that have manifested themselves over your tenure.

The fans put up with a ton of garbage and while there’s been a host of new fans that have come to the game, it’s time to do something to pull it all together and become the overlord of the sportsman’s winter. Carpe diem Gary because this is your golden opportunity to pull it all together. Don’t sit around and wait and hope that the NFL and NBA all blow each other to hell with labor problems next year. Grab the reigns and ride this sucker for all it’s worth. By my count there were 40 superstars who put everything they had into this Olympic tournament fighting over what amounts to be a symbolic prize for a pack of millionaires.

If you can’t sell each and every one of those American and Canadian players for what they did on the ice then I’m at a complete loss and would ask you to step down from being the head of the sport.  As for myself and other keyboard jockeys who live to praise and complain all in one breath all because we love this game so damn much, it pains us to see things handled as badly as they have been.  I know people will always say that the fans care infinitely more than the players or owners ever will and while there’s a high potential for hyperbole there, I buy it.

If this moment in time, something that had nothing at all to do with the NHL (I know, that’s a sore sticking point isn’t it? Too fucking bad.), cannot be used to build the game and make it as great for all those casual sports fans who tuned in to see if their country could win or not… I’m cashing out.

Carpe fucking diem, Gary. Make it happen.