It's getting harder to define what constitutes winners and losers on Deadline Day.
For even longer than I've been alive the easiest rule of thumb in hockey to comprehend was the simplest one: the team that wins the trade is the team that gets the best player.
As comedian Bill Maher now points out on a regular basis, there are: "new rules."
From what we've seen on Trade Deadline Day 2009 one could argue that the team that wins is the one that clears the most cap space for the upcoming free agent season.
On the other hand, one could claim that the team that wins is the one grabs the most draft picks (the new best currency in the NHL today) for the upcoming Entry Draft.
One could even make a case that the winner is the one that comes up with the most innovative way to perhaps legally circumvent the rules of transaction, much the way Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brian Burke is attempting to do in essentially buying a fourth-round draft pick for $500,000 by buying off injured and likely retiring players via a complicated transaction with the Tampa Bay Lightning.
We might even argue the winners are the teams that got their own players signed for rates they can seemingly afford instead of having to trade them and watch them walk for the riches of free agency, riches that by 2010-2011 might not even be there.
Confused? Who isn't?
For all the legitimate hockey deals that went down Wednesday - and there weren't all that many of them - there was some strange concoction that not only was difficult to explain, but was also difficult to comprehend.
Take Burke's deal with Tampa Bay. Burke may have done something outside the spirit of the rules while working completely within them. He traded Richard Petiot to the Lightning for veteran goalie Olie Kolzig, Jamie Heward, Andie Rogers and a fourth-round pick. Knowing full well that Petiot isn't likely to ever be a player in the NHL, that Heward hasn't made it (and likely never will) and that Rogers is also looking at the end of his career, he essentially delivered about a half million dollars in cap space to the Lightning in exchange for a fourth round pick. If this kind of transaction holds up, Burke will have won a battle he's been losing for years, that being the ability to trade cap space from a team that has it to a team that doesn't. This bears a whole lot of watching.
Moving players for the future has been the norm for years in the NHL, but doing it while balancing the now with the future is difficult. Still, several teams have turned it into an art form. Anaheim, playing to make the playoffs and retool for the future made those kinds of moves and did it well. Buffalo got involved in a complex deal with Edmonton and Carolina and seemingly Los Angeles and ended up getting Dominic Moore from Toronto for a second-round draft pick that was, essentially Carolina's. Can you imagine a deal when these two conference rivals would have made a swap straight up?
The Rangers moved players all over the league, but also seemed to have at least made an attempt to shore up their defence in hopes of holding on to a playoff spot as the season plays itself out. In years past New York, and especially general manager Glen Sather, would have just bought up everything not assigned to another club, but up against the cap and with a team in free fall, he moved bodies out which cleared some cap problems and picked up Derek Morris, a player who could actually help his team and his new coach, John Tortorella, salvage their season.
Innovative stuff here and a clear indication that even some of the NHL old dogs can adapt to new ways of doing things.
If there is another trend that showed up on this day, it was that there's an awful lot of truth to the old school thought that you bring your team to training camp and go from there.
In some cases, like Montreal, that was not by design. Others, like New Jersey and Vancouver, made their moves early, away from the fray if you will and are seemingly much better for it. But San Jose pretty much stood pat even though they are now being challenged for the No.1 spot in the West by the team they should fear most, the Detroit Red Wings.
Not surprisingly, the Red Wings also stood pat. Now to be fair, they may have wanted to upgrade their goaltending situation, but who gives you a Cup-caliber goalie at the deadline. Rather than risk wrecking great team chemistry, the Red Wings confidently did nothing, just like the Sharks. Will that hurt them in the end? It could, especially if Chris Osgood doesn't come around in goal, but GM Ken Holland is smart enough to know that his players not only play in front of Osgood, but they rally to support him when he struggles and that kind of "team" play is something you simply don't want to tamper with.
Of course it helps when you are able to pick up one of the league premier scorers, Marian Hossa, during the free-agent season. It helps even more when you can get him off the roster of the team you defeated in the Stanley Cup final the season before.
The one other thing that struck me as "new" was the fact that it appeared that some general managers operated out of fear. Not the fear of a failed deal which is the norm, but fear of making any kind of long-term transaction simply because they just don't know what the future will bring.
In many ways one could see that Philadelphia's hands were tied in regards to trying to make some fine-tune movements, particularly in goal, because they needed to move money out, lots of it, in order to bring anyone of consequence in.
That's on management. They've spent large for several seasons assuming that the cap would always rise and that a rising cap would be their friend. It worked for awhile, but now they are stuck near the top. They can't find an easy way to bring a healthy Daniel Briere back to the roster because they don't have the cap room (and they may have paid him too much when they signed him). They couldn't make a real push for the goalie they have always needed because they were too tight against the cap AND because no one wanted to take on any of their high salaries.
The reason for that? It's not that some teams couldn't afford to, but it they were too afraid to do it. The new rule of thumb is that the Cap is going to go down. Maybe a little next season, maybe a whole lot the season after that.
As Brian Burke said "that scares me" and well it should. If the cap falls the only way to get under it might well be to cut loose high-salary players. That means losing something for nothing and no GM wants to do that.
Smart GMs can't just look at a deal and figure out the talent or the cost, they also have to figure out whether or not they might have to dump that cost down the road and at a time when there will be no takers. A falling cap will sink some ships. The Flyers appear to be one of them and a lot of teams aren't willing to join them or even help them.
That, perhaps more than anything else, was why the number of deals (and especially the number of big deals) paled in comparison to past seasons.
It used to be a whole heck of a lot easier to figure out winners and losers in trade dealings in the NHL.
Not anymore.
New rules indeed.
