Marc Bergevin faced a difficult choice at the NHL trade deadline. It’s a day that always affords opportunities to make expensive, high-risk plays and risk getting burned, or to be cautious to a fault and potentially not do nearly enough.
At the best of times it’s complicated and at worst it can be a minefield. This season saw it at its most convoluted, and Bergevin’s careful navigation of treacherous territory inspires confidence.
The playoff race in the Eastern Conference is a peculiar thing this year. Seven teams in the East have a plus-20 or better goal differential, with every other club in the conference stuck in single digits or in the red.
Those seven teams have pretty comfortably sewn-up playoff spots—there’s a nine-point gap separating the Washington Capitals in the first wild card spot from the Boston Bruins in the second. The weird thing about the situation is how little separation there is at the top; the gap between Washington and Boston is wider than the one between those same Capitals and the first-place Montreal Canadiens.
The playoff implications are clear. There are seven teams in the East that are so closely matched that any one of them could beat any of the others. There isn’t a handful of contenders as there have been in years past; there is a whole class of them, good teams that are much better than the laggards, but that have precious little separation from each other.
For a GM planning his trade deadline, the dilemma was obvious. Any could look at the standings and think his team had a legitimate shot to go the distance in the Stanley Cup playoffs, something that easily justifies a decision to spend draft picks on rental players. At the same time, any one of those GMs could come to the conclusion that there are six teams out there with an honest-to-goodness shot at beating his team in a seven-game series, which doesn’t encourage a go-for-broke mentality.
This is where we rejoin Bergevin and the Canadiens. All seven GMs opted to buy at the deadline, so Bergevin’s decision to make additions shouldn’t come as a shock. What is surprising is how much he managed to procure and how little he paid to do it. If we consider the three trades Bergevin made as one large deal, the Canadiens added defenceman Jeff Petry and forwards Torrey Mitchell and Brian Flynn in exchange for a second-round pick, two fifth-round selections (one of them conditional), a seventh-rounder and undrafted prospect.
Petry fits the organizational emphasis on speed. The mobile blueliner was averaging 21 minutes per game in Edmonton, playing significant roles at even strength, on the penalty kill and at times filling in on the power play. Over the past four years, the Oilers have fired more shots and scored more goals with Petry on the ice, despite the fact that he’s started more than his share of shifts in the defensive zone and against top opponents.
It’s always hard to evaluate a player on a team as bad as the Oilers, but the evidence rather strongly suggests that Petry was part of the solution, not part of the problem. He’ll add a right-handed shot to the blueline and his presence should ensure that the Canadiens ice three strong pairings.
Mitchell and Flynn fit the same philosophy on speed; that’s one of the reasons that Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman suggested Mitchell as a possible rental player well in advance of the deadline. They were often linemates in Buffalo and collaborators on the penalty kill, and as a duo the two outperformed the Sabres’ lousy on-ice shot and goal numbers this season.
Again, it can be hard to evaluate players on a terrible team but both seem to have been positive contributors in a difficult environment. Mitchell also brings 60 games of playoff experience to the organization.
We’re talking about depth pieces in each case, with Petry potentially a second-pair defenceman and Mitchell and Flynn both bottom-six forwards. But roster players tend to be expensive at the deadline, and these three were all outperforming the poor teams around them. How much value did those futures that the Canadiens sent the other way really have?
The prospect, Jack Nevins, is a 21-year-old forward who had no points, a minus-eight rating and 88 penalty minutes in 32 AHL games for a pretty good Hamilton team. Obviously, he’s still young, but he’s far more suspect than prospect. As he’s under contract for another year, one can guess that the Canadiens were just happy clearing his contract off their 50-man reserve list.
The draft picks have more value, but not much. As our own Stephen Burtch demonstrated before the deadline, the value of selections at the bottom end of the draft is minute compared to earlier choices.
Outside of that second round choice, the Canadiens surrendered very little of real value in the three trades they made. Put another way, the total payment that Montreal made was probably comparable to what Washington paid for Curtis Glencross (one second- and one third-round pick); the difference being that the Habs collected three players for that price.
That will only change if Montreal goes on a deep playoff run (in which case that conditional fifth-round pick could rise as high as the third round), but if the Canadiens go on a deep playoff run nobody will begrudge the trade of a third-rounder.
Faced with the tough reality that Montreal could be knocked-off early in the playoffs, Bergevin sensibly opted not to risk anything dear to the organization’s future. At the same time, he improved on the already very real possibility that the Canadiens could win the East, adding depth pieces without sacrificing any of his current roster players.
It’s the kind of thinking we’ve come to expect from Bergevin, who similarly hedged his bets in a series of shrewd salary-cap moves earlier this season. Montreal’s success on the ice this year has provided the team’s fans with much reason for optimism, but it’s Bergevin’s careful maneuvering that offers real reason to believe success is here to stay.