So you’re sitting at home setting your fantasy hockey lineup and thinking about how your team stacks up against your friends’. Do you have enough scoring? Can your players generate enough assists? Do you have the truculence to put up more hits than your opponent on a given week?
You decide a trade is necessary and comb through the rosters of your rivals and draw up a shortlist of targets, but you’re not sure how open the other owner will be to move one of his players. So, you open Facebook or pick up your phone to send a text (however your league communicates) to begin trade negotiations. The initial conversation may go something like this:
You: Hey I was looking at your roster and was interested in acquiring Taylor Hall — any chance you’d move him?
Rival fantasy owner: Heck no I won’t trade him/sure, I need a goalie and some scoring from the blue line.
Now, imagine how trade negotiations open up at the NHL level. At the first stage at least, it’s not all that different than you and your buddies talking fantasy.
“What typically happens is you get a vibe as a GM that somebody’s not happy with somebody, or they’ve got an overabundance of a certain type of player, or you hear rumblings that somebody could be on the block,” Doug MacLean said Thursday on Hockey Central at Noon, using the Calgary situation as an example. “So you phone and you say ‘hey is there any truth, is there any interest, is there any chance that you would consider moving Doug Hamilton?’ That’s what the call is. That’s how I did it and how people did it with me.”
On Wednesday, the ongoing Dougie Hamilton trade rumours were squashed by Calgary Flames president Brian Burke about as forcefully as he could have. He blamed the whole situation on one “idiot GM” who called to inquire about Hamilton. This is where fantasy and reality separate because while you may not mind an opponent letting the rest of your league know you’ve tried to trade a player, thus increasing the potential market for him, real GMs don’t like these things leaking because real people are affected by what they see, hear and read.
“Pierre Lacroix (former Avalanche GM) used to say to me every time we talked trade, and we did a couple of deals, Pierre would say to me ‘Doug we’ll probably make this deal, we’re moving down the road, but if this gets out I know it’s not coming out of Colorado, if this gets out, the trade’s off. I’m out of the deal,” MacLean continued.
Burke’s dismissal of the reality for a Hamilton trade can’t completely eliminate the idea that it could happen in the future because he could, perhaps, be managing the personal aspect of it (rumours never die!). After these kind of leaks are made, some skaters could be impacted so much that their play suffers, or maybe they come to the rink with a worse attitude, uncertain of their future and if they’re about to be uprooted. In Hamilton’s case, a trade would mean a second change of address in less than two years.
Obviously, it’s not clear where this rumour first came from, whether it was the Flames, a potential trade partner, an agent, or someone else. The theatre of trade blocks is incredibly entertaining for fans, but can be immensely frustrating for the players and GMs involved.
And as much as you can try to keep the lid on any trade talks within your own organization, these leaks can be initiated by all sorts of parties. And they don’t even need to leak to the general public for the situation to become an internal issue.
“Sometimes GMs get carried away and they phone the guy’s agent,” MacLean said. “I had a current NHL GM phone me and say, ‘would you trade Adam Foote?’ Adam Foote was my captain I said no I’m not trading Adam Foote. That GM phoned his agent and said ‘I just phoned Columbus, I’d like to get Adam Foote out of there.’ Adam Foote confronts me in the dressing room, in Vancouver, ‘are you shopping me?’ I said no I’m not shopping you. ‘Well I was told you’re shopping me.’
“So I phoned the GM back and said ‘are you kidding me that’s out and out tampering what you just did.’ I have no idea what happened (with Calgary) if anything happened, but it bothers you when you have a conversation with another team and it gets out because it puts everybody in a bad situation.”
