The Puck Stops Here
The Most One-Sided Trade This Year
by PuckStopsHere on 12/02/09 at 10:25 AM ET
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Brian Burke is one of the more active general managers in the NHL. When he joined the Toronto Maple Leafs, it was clear that he wanted to make some trades to put his stamp on the team. This was not so easy to accomplish under the current NHL CBA. Trades are rare except around the NHL trade deadline (where players with expiring contracts are usually moved) and during the summer (when a team has not set its roster yet and thus has some flexibility). This scarcity of trade opportunities has frustrated Burke. He has suggested that the CBA be amended to allow trades where a team trades a portion of a salary cap hit. This idea is a non-starter without CBA amendment (which is not trivial) and it is not clear how it improves things for the fan (do a lack of trades have anything to do with the quality of hockey games? I don’t see how.).
Nevertheless, Burke has pushed (often unsuccessfully) to make trades. One of his priorities has been to make his team tougher. In order to do this he has been willing to trade a more talented player to get more toughness. When a GM gets desperate to push a trade through and is willing to give up the most talented player in a deal, they are ready to be taken advantage of and this is what happened to Brian Burke.
This summer, Burke traded Pavel Kubina and Tim Stapleton to the Atlanta Thrashers for Garnet Exelby and Colin Stuart. Colin Stuart and Tim Stapleton are yet to play NHL games since the deal, so at this point they are non-factors in the evaluation of the trade. Exelby is clearly a tougher player than Kubina, so Burke succeeded in getting a tougher team, but he lost significantly in terms of hockey talent. Pavel Kubina has been a very good defenceman this season. Kubina has been the number one defenceman on the rising Atlanta Thrashers so far this year. He has scored 12 points in 23 games and has been very solid defensively. This is partly shown by his +16 +/- rating (which is third highest in the league). Kubina has done this while playing against the toughest competition Atlanta faces.
Toronto fans may be wondering where Kubina’s sudden defensive prowess came from. It wasn’t noticed in Toronto. However, that may be a case of a poor defensive system on a poor defensive team in Toronto that makes it hard for any player to show his defensive prowess. This summer, it was thought that Toronto signed two free agent defencemen with strong defensive skills in Mike Komisarek and Francois Beauchemin and neither have had defensive success in Toronto.
Garnet Exelby has been a frequent healthy scratch in Toronto. In the thirteen games he has played, he has one point and a -6 +/- rating. This is not the kind of return one would want in return for a number one defenceman.
Toronto gave up a player who has been a number one defenceman in a trade this summer to get a spare part back. This is a very good trade for Atlanta and a very poor one for Toronto. The most likely way to take advantage of a general manager in a trade is to find the guy most desperate to make one. Don Waddell did this with Brian Burke this summer. Burke has a good reputation as a GM with his past successes (most significantly his Stanley Cup win in Anaheim), but deals like this set the Toronto Maple leafs backwards. If Kubina was playing as well as he has been in Atlanta, but in a Leafs uniform, the Leafs would likely be further out of the cellar in the NHL standings.
Filed in: | The Puck Stops Here | Permalink
Tags: Atlanta+Thrashers, Brian+Burke, Garnet+Exelby, Pavel+Kubina, Toronto+Maple+Leafs,
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