The Toronto Maple Leafs and Dallas Stars almost never make trades together.
To give you an idea of how rarely these two teams deal with each other, the Leafs and Stars have only made two trades together since the beginning of 2002. The last deal the Leafs made with the Stars was January 13, 2011 – six years ago.
Since 2002, the Stars have had Doug Armstrong, Les Jackson, Brett Hull, Joe Nieuwendyk, and Jim Nill at the helm. The Leafs have had Pat Quinn, John Ferguson Jr., Cliff Fletcher 2.0, Brian Burke, Dave Nonis, the trio of Mark Hunter, Kyle Dubas, and Brandon Pridham, and now Lou Lamoriello. It’s just bizarre to me how these two teams who don’t have to worry about each other as conference rivals never make a deal. It’s a complete guess, but I wonder if either of them ever have a GM in charge for long enough that they actually get to build a relationship with each other. Brian Burke and Joe Nieuwendyk executed the last trade between these two clubs, for crying out loud.
In their most recent deal together, Toronto sent Belarusian forward Mikhail Stefanovich to Dallas in exchange for the enigmatic Fabian Brunnstrom. Remember that name? Brunnstrom was a highly sought-after Swedish scoring phenom who many teams coveted, included the Leafs. Brunnstrom burst on to the scene with the Stars with four goals, two assists, and six points in a five-game point streak to start his career before ultimately fizzling in North America after a few seasons. Brunnstrom never made the NHL with the Leafs and Stefanovich never made the NHL at all.
But I’m not writing about the Fabian Brunnstrom trade.
The second-most recent trade between the Leafs and Stars happened on November 6, 2005.
The Leafs traded enforcer Nathan Perrott to the Dallas Stars in exchange for a sixth-round pick in 2006.
Perrott was picked in the second round of the 1995 NHL draft by Lou Lamoriello and the New Jersey Devils. Perrott was above a point-per-game player over his OHL career with the Oshawa Generals and Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds. Figure this one out: Perrott scored in 46 points in 63 games for the Generals heading into his draft year and was selected in the second round. That season, one of Perrott’s Oshawa teammates scored 139 points in 66 games and wasn’t selected until the fourth round. His name? Marc Savard.
Perrott did lead his peers in one category, though: An insane amount of penalty minutes.
His career high was 307 PIMs in 72 IHL games in 1998-99. He hit 200-plus penalty minutes five times: Twice in the IHL, twice in the AHL, and once in the OHL. My favourite stat is that in just nine KHL games, he had 137 penalty minutes. That’s wasn’t hard to pull off on the once-notorious goon squad Vityaz Chekov. Perrott’s debut in this video of a 2008-09 Vityaz brawl comes about 3:20 in. He’s No. 8 in red.
Perrott was a warrior on the ice. Between the NHL, AHL, KHL, CHL, and LNAH, Perrott had 123 hockey fights, according to HockeyFights.com. That doesn’t even include his junior career.
I guess what I’m getting at is that he knew how to use his fists.
Here’s Perrott handling Andrew Peters:
And his all-out fist feast with a young Chris Neil.
Holy smokes! Remember when hockey fights were like that?
Despite all the fighting and his lack of scoring in the NHL (nine points in 89 games), Perrott wasn’t your typical “goon”. At the 2004 Leafs skills competition, Perrott won the fastest skater event with a time of 13.998 seconds, and he had the hardest shot with a 100.3 mph blast. In the same year!
After his 2005 trade to Dallas, Perrott put up two goals and one assist for three points in 23 games as a Star. He also racked up 54 penalty minutes. Here’s a video of Perrott fighting Scott Thornton while with Dallas, dawning a jersey with the infamous Stars “Mooterus” logo.
Unfortunately for Perrott, his NHL career ended with the Stars that season. He ended up returning to the Leafs organization with the Marlies, but the AHL is as close as he got to returning to the show.
Now, about that sixth-rounder the Leafs got…
Again, in exchange for Perrott, the Stars gave Toronto a 2006 sixth-round pick.
For all the flack the Leafs (used to) get for drafting poorly, they really did rock the 2006 draft. Six of Toronto’s seven picks ended up playing in the NHL. Jiri Tlusty played 446 NHL games, although the Leafs gave up on him relatively young. Nikolay Kulemin (44th overall), James Reimer (99th overall), Korbinian Holzer (111th overall), and Viktor Stalberg (161st overall) are all still in the NHL. The one player the Leafs picked in 2006 who didn’t play in the NHL was sixth-rounder Tyler Ruegsegger.
But that wasn’t the sixth-rounder Dallas gave Toronto.
With Toronto’s final selection in 2006, the 180th overall pick given to them by the Dallas Stars, the Leafs select…
The journey obviously wasn’t as simple as that for Uncle Leo.
After being selected out of Finland in 2006, Komarov spent three seasons with the Pelicans of the SM-Liiga. The highest Komarov ever finished in Pelicans team scoring was seventh, with 24 points in 56 games in 2008-09.
After that, Komarov joined the KHL’s Moscow Dynamo for three seasons from 2009 to 2012. The pesky Finn developed a bit more of a scoring touch and after winning the 2012 Gagarin Cup, Komarov set his sights on North America.
The Leafs, then with Brian Burke as GM, signed Komarov to an NHL deal on May 29, 2012. Smooth sailing, right?
Lockout.
Komarov spent 14 games with the Toronto Marlies before shipping back to Moscow Dynamo where he waited for the lockout to end.
How could you blame Komarov? He played on a line with Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom. You can see evidence of that in this highlight pack I helped edit, write, and announce in a past life. Komarov first appears 52 seconds in.
Small side note, Backstrom’s original KHL number was 99. People got all mad about that so he changed it to 69. Like everything with Backstrom, his trolling is underrated.
As I remember, Komarov’s line with Ovechkin and Backstrom was arguably the best line in the KHL in a loaded lockout season, maybe second to Magnitogorsk’s three-headed monster of Evgeni Malkin, Nikolay Kulemin, and prolific KHL scorer Sergei Mozyakin.
Once the lockout ended, Komarov joined the Leafs for nine points in 42 games and appearanced in seven Leafs playoff games that allegedly happened.
Then due to a tight cap situation because of additions like David Clarkson, the Leafs didn’t re-sign Komarov and he went back to Dynamo Moscow again.
The following summer, Dave Nonis flew overseas to negotiate Komarov’s return: A whopping four-year contract at $2.95 million per season.
Given Komarov’s minimal production, the reception in Leafs Nation was lukewarm. Again, Komarov had just nine points in the only 42 NHL games he had played.
In a depth role during Randy Carlyle’s last stand and the atrocity that was the short-lived Peter Horachek era, Komarov earned eight goals and 18 assists for 26 points in 62 games.
As soon as Mike Babcock joined the Leafs, Komarov was bumped up to a much bigger role, often playing on the top line. In 67 games, Komarov responded with 19 goals, 17 assists and 36 points as the team’s lone all-star.
Today, Komarov is glued to Nazem Kadri at five-on-five and, still at 30-years-old, is currently the Leafs’ oldest forward behind Tyler Bozak. For a once-upon-a-time sixth-rounder acquired for an enforcer over 10 years ago, “The Nathan Perrott” trade has been a smashing success for the Leafs.
So, what did Perrott do after hockey? It’s actually a neat story.
He dabbled in professional boxing.
Perrott also tried some coaching with the OHL’s Owen Sound Attack and, like a Jason Statham movie, he joined a paramilitary team assigned to defending a nuclear power plant. Seriously.
For any Stars fan who feels ripped off, maybe this will help a bit: The very next trade the Stars made, just over one month later on December 12, 2005, Dallas sent a seventh-rounder (who never played an NHL game) to the Florida Panthers for Niklas Hagman. He was with the Stars for three seasons! Then the Leafs stole him in free agency and used him to get Dion Phaneuf, but whatever.
If you’re an NHL GM, the moral of the story seems to be “The more picks you have, the better.” Well, how do you get those picks? In trades. How do you make a trade?
Uncle Leo knows.
