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Calgary In Panic Mode
by PuckStopsHere on 02/02/10 at 10:19 AM ET
Comments (7)
The Calgary Flames seemed poised for a good season this year. They barely missed out on the Northwest Division championship last year, largely due to not dressing a full roster in the stretch drive due to salary cap problems. This year looked like they could do even better. Miikka Kiprusoff looked ready to improve his numbers and get closer to the Vezina Trophy level he had played at in the past. Jay Bouwmeester was added to an already talented defence including Dion Phaneuf and Robyn Regehr, to give Calgary a defence that could be the league’s best. Jarome Iginla gave the team a strong scoring threat and players like Olli Jokinen and Daymond Langkow offered some depth. This was a team that appeared to be in contention.
For the first couple months of the season, that prediction appeared to be roughly on the mark and then a very rough stretch hit in January. Calgary has lost ten of their last eleven games. Their only win came against bottom feeding Edmonton, who had not won at all in 2010 so far until last night. If the season ended right now, Calgary would be dropped out of the playoffs as they sit in ninth in the West Conference.
When the going got tough, Calgary re-assessed their situation. There are several ways they could have done this. They could have decided that they were going through a particularly bad stretch, but they had the talent to do well if they rode it out. Calgary would thus keep their core together to make the best playoff run that they could. They could have decided that this team was not good enough to win and retooled by sending declining veterans away in exchange for prospects. They did neither. They decided to make trades, but ill-advised ones. They decided to trade once highly valued players who were going through rough stretches away while their market value was at an all-time low. They were willing to take on the spare parts that teams were offering in return for some of their better players.
Their first trade was to move Dion Phaneuf, Fredrik Sjostrom and Keith Aulie to Toronto for Ian White, Matt Stajan, Niklas Hagman and Jamal Mayers. Calgary had given up a 24 year old former Norris Trophy finalist for several spare parts from a Leafs team in the race for last place. They certainly did not get back any players who have anywhere near the potential that Phaneuf has.
Their second trade (which was bizarrely not completed until over a day after it was first announced) was to send Olli Jokinen and Brandon Prust to the New York Rangers for Ales Kotalik and Christopher Higgins. Once again they give up the biggest talent in the deal in Jokinen (while his value is lowest - in part because he is a pending UFA) in order to pick up two pieces that the New York Rangers did not want. Prust and Kotalik are the two players involved where the teams will keep their rights into next year. Kotalik is signed for two more years for $3 million per season, which makes him significantly overpaid for his production. Prust is a restricted free agent who will likely have a much more manageable contract.
Calgary made two trades where they gave up the most talent and got back spare pieces. The parts coming back to Calgary are not young players with significant upside. They are the same pieces that Toronto and New York wanted to deal and had likely offered throughout the league. Neither team that dealt with the Flames believe they gave up players that they really wish they could have kept.
Calgary appears to have given up in their hopes of contending this year and they have not helped themselves to be in a better position in the future in the way that they did it. It seems that GM Darryl Sutter decided that his moves to try to contend this year were mistakes and he threw them out before fully playing his hand. Though he probably was not going to win the Stanley Cup with the team, there was a reasonable chance of Calgary having a solid playoff run. These trades call Sutter’s competence into doubt. You do not improve your team by selling players when their value is at an all time low. The successful move is to buy low and sell high. Calgary has done the opposite.
Filed in: | The Puck Stops Here | Permalink
Tags: Calgary+Flames, Darryl+Sutter, Dion+Phaneuf, New+York+Rangers, Olli+Jokinen, Toronto+Maple+Leafs,
Comments
Their only win came against bottom feeding Edmonton, who has not won at all in 2010 so far.
Actually, they won last night.
Posted by Steve Strowbridge from St. John's, NL, CA on 02/02/10 at 10:54 AM ET
Looks like Calgary is shedding cap space to rebuild yet again. I don’t know how a team can give up when sliding all the way to nearly tied for 8th.
Posted by redxblack from Akron Ohio on 02/02/10 at 11:56 AM ET
If these moves are intended to free up cap space, the assumption being made is that there exists a player to sign who is better than Dion Phaneuf who will fit into his cap space. I do not believe that is true.
I would bet that Calgary’s biggest off-season free agent signee is not nearly as good as Phaneuf.
As for Jokinen, trading him makes no sense if the goal is to free up cap space. He is gone this summer as a UFA and they now have two more years of overpaying Ales Kotalik to show for him.
Posted by PuckStopsHere on 02/02/10 at 12:07 PM ET
yes this doesn’t look like it is a cap-space clearing move. it would make no sense to take on a contract like kotalik after just getting rid of phaneuf under that assumption. im assuming that uncle darryl isn’t quite done with his moves yet, because if he is, there is gonna be hell to pay if the flames don’t scoring. marx said religion is the opiate of the masses, well my opiate is a dream of getzlaf in calgary.
Posted by dickshilling on 02/02/10 at 12:37 PM ET
There are essentially three ways to guage the beneficiary in an NHL trade:
1. Which team got the best player,
2. Which team improved its performance post-trade (i.e. moved higher in the standings, playoff success), and
3. Long-term benefit.
It should be clear from this weekend’s moves that Calgary did not acquire superior talent in any of their swaps nor did the Flames improve their skill level. I cannot give them credit for the first standard..
It remains to be seen if they’ve improved their grit and if that can add a few more games to the wins column. That second standard is pending.
As for long-term benefit, with most of the new bodies UFA’s at the end of the year, their continuing contributions provided by these players (or cap relief their depature may provide) is an open question.
A team that features one of the top netminders in the league, an impressive defense and a prolific scorer should be better than a playoff bubble squad. After a prolonged slide Calgary had to make movies. But now there’s a log jam at forward that needs to be cleared, and all these moves seem to be phase one of a larger effort.
Calgary has the pro-rated cap space to absorb a $5 million player. With this surplus of small UFA contracts, the Flames can easily move a couple of other players for depth draft picks to clear up more cap space. Which begs the question: are the Flames going to make a play for a top end player at the deadline?
Kovalchuk has a cap hit of $6.5 million, so it wouldn’t take movement much to bring him on board. Lecavalier is a bit more of a challenge at $7.7, but the math could be made to work. While Kovalchuk is a superior weapon, the prospect of Lecavalier centering Iginla long term is mouth watering.
Posted by Matthew McCallum from Redding, California on 02/03/10 at 03:59 PM ET
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Very strange trades indeed.
What the heck is going on in Calgary?????
Defenceman in the NHL rarely mature until they are 26-27. Phaneuf is going to come back and bite Calgary hard. Probably with a Norris before he is 30.
Posted by Laker from ROCKSTAR on 02/02/10 at 10:45 AM ET