Friday, February 22, 2019

NHL Trade Deadline...


 

Not a topic most of you care about, but the deadline is Monday. It's a stressful time for players who don't have no-move or no-trade clauses in their contracts. It's an interesting time for fans because should your favorite player not have one of those two clauses in their contract, they could be shipped off to some other team.

The timing of the deadline is interesting. Maybe it's scheduled this way on purpose. I'm sure it probably is; I don't know the history of the NHL well enough. But we're about 2/3 of the way through the season. We're on the home stretch for the playoffs. Is a given team in or is a given team out of contention? Is the team "on the bubble"? In other words, the team is hovering around the wild card slot--maybe in one of the two slots, maybe just outside of a wild card spot. With a little luck on your part and some bad luck for other teams, you can slide in.

This  time of year is when those bubble teams can hopefully trade their way into a playoff run.

My Dallas Stars need some offensive help and badly. Meaning our general manager needs to make a good move by Monday to get us a goal scorer or two.

That also means we lose assets--whether those are future draft picks, prospects, guys playing in our AHL affiliate, or up and coming young guns who play now and who we anticipate to be great in the future. We have guys the fans would love to see go. Unfortunately, they aren't worth much in and of themselves. Conceivably they could be better in another team's system and I hope that happens for them. But we have to get them to those other teams somehow.

Luckily, our big names have those clauses in place. Other guys just aren't really on the table because no one needs their skills and they're doing a good job for us.

We have a handful of middle six forwards who are worth something. I'd hate to see them go. But I'd love for the Stars to make the playoffs this year...

As of last night, with a big win against a division rival (St. Louis Blues), the Dallas Stars remained in the top wild card slot.



Now to bite my nails (metaphorically speaking) through the weekend and see how the lineup changes from day to day and for the two games we play between now and Monday.

Have a great weekend!

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