Both Brad Treliving and Craig MacTavish stuck with the present and pointed to the future on Monday afternoon. The horizon just seems a little bit closer in Calgary than Edmonton, is all.
For Treliving, patience meant trading a passed-by prospect Sven Baertschi for a second round draft pick and holding fast to the draft picks he reaped for his biggest trading chip, Curtis Glencross, who had gone to Washington on Sunday. While in Edmonton, keeping a cool head meant taking two picks for Jeff Petry and simply refusing to dip into the pool of young talent atop the Oilers forward ranks.
“I just don’t see another option, I really don’t,” pleaded Oilers general manager MacTavish, when asked about dealing one of his young core of Jordan Eberle, Taylor Hall, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins or Nail Yakupov. He said he simply “had no interest” in doing so.
“We can’t lose sight of the big picture here. We can’t lose sight of the fact we are the 29th team in the league,” he allowed. “(But) we’re on the cusp, in my mind… Good times are coming. The worst of this is in the rearview mirror, as we stand here today. To trade one of our very valuable assets … to try and fill another hole? You’re just opening up another hole. We’re not deep enough.”
Down the highway — well, actually, in Philadelphia, where the Flames are gathered prior to their Tuesday night versus the Flyers — Treliving collected a second- and third-round draft pick for Glencross, and another second-rounder when he sent Baertschi to Vancouver. It was the first Calgary-Vancouver trade since 1991 (Dana Murzyn for Ron Stern and Kevan Guy).
But the biggest impact on the Flames’ playoff chances came when Treliving reluctantly announced that captain Mark Giordano is scheduled for surgery this week to repair a torn tendon in his biceps muscle. “There’s no opportunity for him to play (the rest of the season),” Treliving said. “The surgery we’re talking about, it’s four, five months (rehab time). It’s devastating for all of us.”
You can say that it simply isn’t fair, when a team overachieves the way Calgary has, to reach March 2 and be right in contention for a playoff spot, only to lose its captain and best player for the rest of the season. But no club in the NHL is more resilient than the Flames.
Calgary has three games in four nights — Tuesday in Philly, Thursday in Boston, Friday in Detroit — a run that they’re going to have to survive if they want their playoff hopes to be intact when they land in Calgary, after the last stop on their seven-game road trip Sunday in Ottawa.
Really though, everything from here on in is gravy for the Flames. I wondered if Treliving would be tempted to deal one of his extra draft picks for some help in the here and now, but he stuck to his developmental guns. Calgary even sold high on 2011 13th overall pick (by the former administration) Sven Baertschi, dealing him to the Vancouver Canucks for a second round pick.
“Every player has a different timeline,” Treliving said diplomatically, about a player who is 22 and had asked for a trade. “Ultimately you have to be very patient, but you also look out in the marketplace. We felt, at this time, with that value, it was the time to act.”
It will be a fascinating deal to watch pan out. Both Treliving and Canucks GM Jim Benning are wise hockey men who know a prospect when they see one, yet they obviously disagree on Baertschi. I wonder who will be proven right here?
MacTavish, meanwhile, was forced to move Petry as the pending UFA simply wanted to go elsewhere this summer. MacTavish hoped for a second-rounder and a prospect, but ended up with the Round 2 pick from Montreal, plus a fifth-rounder that could move up to a third-rounder if the Habs win two playoff rounds this spring.
Most fans overvalued Petry’s worth, a fact driven home by a trade market that was tepid for Petry.
“There was a lot of interest to plenty of teams, but he was not most teams’ primary interest,” said MacTavish. “If I was making the deal with the media (more so the bloggers), I might have got there. The market is what the market is.”
Both teams now head to the June draft with a pile of selections with which to stock their cupboards, or surely in Edmonton’s case, improve the product by trading for NHL-ready players. Edmonton has two picks in each of the first three rounds and MacTavish said he’d talk trade with any of them — other than “the lottery pick” which will likely be a Top 3 at worst.
Calgary has one first-rounder, three picks in Round 2, and two third-rounders. For a keen-eyed hockey man like Treliving, that’s gold.
The future got a little closer in Alberta on Monday. It just appears to be arriving from the south.
