Of all the trade deadlines, the NHL's is the best because it is the most active and most chaotic. How chaotic, you ask? Try this. The St. Louis Blues traded defenseman Colton Parayko to the Buffalo Sabres, a big deal given the fact that, in a reversal of traditional fortunes, the Sabres are among the best teams in the league. The two sides agreed to a deal, and then … ONLY THEN, we tell you, did the Blues ask Parayko if he would waive his no-movement clause and accept the deal. And Parayko said no. You would think this would have been done in the opposite order just out of simple logic. "Colton, can we trade you to a team that could win the Stanley Cup?" "No. Piss off." "OK, cool. Tell the Sabres we can’t deal.” But there you go. A player exercising his contract provisions is somehow a surprise because they declined to ask ahead of time.
It's not been a particularly good deadline. When the day began, TSN's Trade Centre (yeah, Centre) had a promotion from one of the gambling consortii for an over/under of 18.5 trades on the day itself, and it took until 10:30 a.m. to get the first one, and then another hour and change before the second. You be the general manager? No, you bet on human movement futures and find out that the whole league has a no-trade deal today and you're on the chair-bottom end of it.
Even the lack of action makes it worthwhile, because everyone has to back and fill with other rumors that don't come off. And because the actual deadline doesn't mean the end of the news—all trades have to be filed with the league office, which then sifts through the details to see if the money and other provisions work. That means you can get an announcement on a trade hours after the end of the trade deadline, so it's not a deadline as much as a last call.
Mostly, though, the trade deadline is a festival of Toronto Maple Leafs talk because the Leafs are still bigger in Canada than any team is big in America, at least media-wise. What is better still is the fact that this particular Leafs team is awful, and when you tie that angstian environment into Canada's general response to the two Olympic hockey competitions (losing in overtime to the Yanks both times), you can actually tilt your ear to the border and hear the sound of flogging.
This is a rare form of national agony because (a) the Leafs are Canada's biggest team, (b) most Canadians hate them in direct proportion to how much Toronto loves them, and (c) these days, Toronto hates them too. The Leafs have lost 14 of their last 18, including Thursday's quit-a-palooza against the ghastly New York Rangers, and are almost sure to miss the playoffs for the first time in a decade. But wait! Even that playoff record makes their fans hate them because they have been eliminated in the first round seven times in those nine attempts, and have not reached a Cup final since 1967, when there were only six teams. They're the Sacramento Kings with the national profile of the Lakers. Think of it.
So the trade deadline brings out the worst in the worst, and that means a wonderfully psychotic day-to-day reaction from an army of pundits who under normal circumstances seem like perfectly normal and well-adjusted people —well, normal and well-adjusted when compared to the wall of theatrical trouser-foulers we employ here under the hat. They have been demanding that the Leafs back up the truck and dump everything from team president Keith Pelley down to whoever is their backup goalie at the time. The only exception is Auston Matthews, who makes $13 million a year and is the embodiment of the team at its best. In other words, he is the best talent, and has an underpublicized injury that has been hampering him all season, and a recent photo of him in the dressing room with spider tape on his right shoulder created a howlfest of "MAKE HIM HAVE SURGERY NOW!" The second great debate of the day has been, "How Much Longer Will Matthews Put Up With This Bullshit Before He Demands To Leave?"
Conversely, it is generally agreed that Matthews's $11 million compatriot William Nylander is the most polarizing Leaf on the payroll now that Mitch Marner is gone, in that the debate jerks back and forth between collective hatred and "Trade Him To Vancouver For A Rotting Flounder!" Nylander is the franchise crap magnet because of his almost canonical resistance to checking, and his money makes him all the less popular. For those who of you who don't hockey, multiply every hockey dollar by five to get an NBA dollar, so Nylander being the 14th best-paid player at $11 million is the equivalent of Even Mobley at $53.8M. Have you ever hated Evan Mobley for any reason?
The Leafs seem to be in cannibals-on-the-poop-deck mode. Head coach Craig Berube said at Wednesday’s morning skate before the team's overtime loss in New Jersey that nobody would be held out of the lineup for "roster management," which a tidy way of saying "We don't want any of these mopes hurt in case we can trade them." Hours later, the team announced that three players were in fact going to be held out for roster management, which screams, "These people don't talk to each other any more." One of the players who did play against the Devils, Nicolas Roy, was the one who got traded, so they definitely don't talk to each other.
Because nothing is ever simple with these yobs, GM Brad Treliving, who has been consistently bopped for not being bold enough and who was also out of first-round picks, making the demanded rebuild nearly impossible and thus another well-chronicled outrage, somehow managed to get a first and a fifth out of the Avalanche for Roy. This made Treliving a hero and a villain simultaneously, the quadruple axle of sporty punditry. And absolutely normal for the Leafs.
You see, when you combine a powerful national brand in a country with only seven pro hockey outposts, and give that brand six decades without a championship, you get an almost overpowering effervescence of insanity. And we love them all for it, because this is what a trade deadline should be: a national festival of brain bubbles that pop loudly, re-form and then pop again.
