Mark Spector

Mark Spector is a columnist for sportsnet.ca

If you're trying to build your team in March you probably haven't been doing your work in July.

It always looked pretty easy to Joe Nieuwendyk when he was a Calgary Flame. Deadline Day for a National Hockey League general manager was like shuffling a deck of cards.

"It seemed like, when I was a player before the cap world, I would be at practice in Calgary and the trainer would be calling the guys off the ice, one after another after another," the Dallas Stars GM said recently. "It seemed like there would be four or five guys moving (every year)."

Isn't that life? The job you've always wanted seems so easy -- until you actually get it. In the meantime, the entire economy has changed in the NHL. Trades are as rare as a Brendan Witt goal, as scarce as a Canadian Stanley Cup champion.

And the deadline? If you're trying to build your team in March, says Sharks GM Doug Wilson, you probably haven't been doing your work in July and August.

"The majority of GMs build their teams in the summer," said Wilson, who prefers only to tweak at the deadline. "We've made our moves already. We picked up Niclas Wallin and added a depth guy in Jay Leach."

Wilson's theory is to shop accordingly during the free-agent period, recognize the remaining roles that need filling, and give the young players in your organization the first opportunity to fill whatever holes exist when the season starts. If, by the end of January, none of your kids has seized the opportunity, then Deadline Day provides an opportunity to procure the necessary players to fill those roles.

However big-name players, like Ilya Kovalchuk, come at a major price in March. Come summertime when they are unrestricted free agents, they can be had without burning draft picks and prospects.

Besides, trying to make deals during the season has become such an exercise in mathematics, it hardly ever seems to work out.

"It's a common complaint with a lot of the (GMs) I talk to," Nieuwendyk said. "There's the cap, and then there is your internal budget. Then you have to agree (with an opposing GM) on the players, and their salaries have to work. The No. 1 complaint I hear from GMs all year long is that it's just so damned hard to make things happen."

Which is a shame, when you consider the buzz a good trade creates across the world of hockey.

The Stars are in a fight to make the playoffs, sitting ninth in the West at the Olympic break. With the NBA's Mavericks, MLB's Rangers, college sports and the ever-present Cowboys in the Dallas sports market, the Stars can get buried in the news.

But a trade puts this franchise on the front sports page in the Dallas Morning News, and makes them a talk-show topic far ahead of what the Stars do on the ice in mid-January. The same goes for any American team, to varying degrees.

"No question," agreed Nieuwendyk. "We traded for Kari Lehtonen (on Feb. 9), and still people are buzzing about it. Then, of course, they say, 'What about Marty Turco?'"

The deadline, however, has become a microcosm of the game itself that was reshaped during the lockout of 2004-05.

Those who did the reconfiguration of the rulebook were not entirely sure how every detail would play out as part of the finished product. And those who sat across the table during negotiations to devise the salary cap system were far too busy worrying about the owners' and players' financial interests to concern themselves with how the new collective bargaining agreement would work out for the fans.

"I don't know that it's what we hoped for," admitted Edmonton GM Steve Tambellini of the new deadline parameters. "But what we have now are more GMs who have bubble teams. Other than the elite teams who know they are going to make the playoffs and compete for the Cup, there are now more contenders. Teams that are hesitant to do something too far before the deadline because they don't know if they are buyers or sellers."

And, we would add, more teams who would be wise to sell now and build for next year, yet are lured away from that strategy of slow, steady building by the temptation of that elusive spot in the playoffs.

Even if that is penny wise and pound foolish sometimes.