Ficticious tweets, breaking stories and plenty of rumours highlight an otherwise quiet Deadline Day.
There was a fake RealKyper, who announced the trade of Dustin Penner to Montreal for Jarred Tinordi and a first-rounder, about 40 minutes prior to the actual deal that made Penner an L.A. King for a different young defenceman, Colten Tuebert, a first and a conditional third.
There was an imposter Real--ESPNLeBrun, probably some skinny, clean-shaven Western Canadian. And there was the genuine @Jlupul, one of the newest Toronto Maple Leafs who had the poor judgment to make this tweet — "Long Island bound. So I hear..." — on the busiest Twitter day in the history of the @twitterhockey world.
"Haha it was all a conspiracy!! I’m all T.O.," Joffrey Lupul tweeted sheepishly, once the internet caught fire with Lupul-to-the-Islanders rumours.
There is even, we are told, a counterfeit @evankaosmak out there somewhere. There are a lot of things we don’t know, folks, but after spending a day at Sportsnet headquarters Monday, we can say for sure that there is only one Evanka Osmak.
They tell me twitter was active at the 2010 deadline, but I wouldn’t know. @SportsnetSpec was born sometime during the playoffs last spring, and by the end of day Monday, he was trending in both Washington D.C. and Montreal.
Or so Twitter told him, and we all know Twitter doesn’t lie.
We have to say, we thought eight-hour shifts of television coverage could change Trade Deadline Day, and it has. But add in Twitter, the fastest way to announce a trade, break a scoop, or impersonate a media personality, and Deadline Day will never be the same.
There were 16 trades in total -- 35 players and 12 draft picks -- the least action since the 1999-2000 season. Unless you count the two Penner trades. Or the Brad Richards deal that was rumoured so hard all day long that, well, it might have actually happened amidst all that speculation, and we just missed it.
Vancouver, the best team in Canada and perhaps the National Hockey League, hung around quietly all day long before general manager Mike Gillis grabbed some fourth-line help in Maxim Lapierre and the oft-traveled Chris Higgins.
Both players go from hockey obscurity in Anaheim and Florida, into what could be — save the 2010 Olympics — the hottest Canadian puck environment this spring since Calgary and Edmonton made their runs in ’04 and ’06 respectively. Probably hotter.
"What we wanted to do was make sure we had experience on the fourth line, and speed," said Gillis. "Our team is a fast team. We wanted a little grit a little experience, a little speed."
Gillis replaced Cody Hodgson and Victor Oreskovich on his fourth line, then sent them both packing for Manitoba. In Calgary, meanwhile, GM Jay Feaster managed to add the savvy Fredrik Modin, a veteran of many wars.
"Modin gives us essentially the 13th forward now, and we bring in a winner," said Feaster, who kept his promise not to mess with a winning Flames lineup. "Someone who has won a Stanley Cup, who has won Olympic gold, who has won gold at the world championships. We accomplished what we wanted to from a depth standpoint, and we didn’t lose anyone from our dressing room."
And in Edmonton, GM Steve Tambellini lost the biggest player ion his dressing room but hung on to the best. He moved Penner for a 6-foot-4 defenceman who is just 20 in Teubert, and sent him straight to the farm in Oklahoma City. Tambellini also got first- and third-round draft picks, and could well have a lottery pick and another Top 20, come June.
And he didn’t trade Ales Hemsky, which preserves for Edmonton the opportunity to have enough offence to play meaningful games next March. Maybe even, with a couple of UFA pick-ups this summer, they can challenge for the playoffs.
"There was nothing close that (made me) want to move our best player. Never anything," he said of Hemsky, "that made think twice about returning the call."
Why answer? The way Monday went, who knows who might have been on the other end of the line?
