Insider Trading: Too much time and focus spent on Canucks stars
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TSN’s Hockey Insiders with the latest from Vancouver, the Hurricanes still shopping and how the top teams in the East won’t let Carolina affect their own plans, how Kirill Kaprizov’s surgery impacts the Wild’s deadline plans, who will replace Alex Pietrangelo at the 4 Nations and the NHL/NHLPA’s 2028 upcoming World Cup announcement.
There’s a feeling in Vancouver, because of the turmoil between J.T. Miller and Elias Pettersson, that the Canucks may be willing to accept a low-ball offer. What are you hearing from Jim Rutherford?
Darren Dreger: They’re not interested in a low-ball offer. It has to be respectable. You’re talking about two star-quality players in Miller and Pettersson. This scenario of trying to trade both, or one, of those guys, has been ongoing for the last couple of months.
Rutherford talked about the meetings they’ve had with management and the coaching staff with Miller and Pettersson to try to mend the fence and get these guys to work and operate within the confines of the team.
They just haven’t found any form of resolution.
This means now you’re at the place where you try to expedite a trade. It has to be a respectable trade, especially for Miller. He’s got a no-movement clause so if they have to carry this thing into the summer, if the offers aren’t good enough, they’re willing to do that.
They appreciate the talent that Pettersson is and will present, so no fire sale in Vancouver.
The Canes pulled off a blockbuster and acquired Mikko Rantanen from the Colorado Avalanche. Are you hearing that they might not be done yet?
Chris Johnston: I wouldn’t think so. One of the interesting things as we emerge from the smoke of that blockbuster is the fact that the Hurricanes still have five weeks before the deadline and they intend to use that period of time to continue shopping for upgrades.
I’ll point out that in the series of moves they made on the weekend, they lost a depth centre in Jack Drury who wasn’t replaced, so perhaps they’ll look to upgrade.
There’s one area though that I don’t think they’re in the market for and that’s goaltending. Earlier in the year they went through an awful stretch of injuries. Frederik Andersen, among others, were out, and at that time general manager Eric Tulsky did look at the goaltending market but they didn’t end up making a move.
Now with Andersen back healthy, there’s a feeling that the team is headed in the right direction. Unless there’s an injury or a surprise player available around the league, I think Carolina is fine with what they have in net moving forward.
Pierre LeBrun: In the meantime, the question is how does Carolina’s blockbuster impact the rest of the Eastern Conference? I reached out to the GMs of all the top Eastern teams and the answer was unanimous: They all said that, no, they don’t think Carolina’s move will change or impact their plans at the deadline.
Toronto Maple Leafs GM Brad Treliving says he doesn’t believe that it does for his team. Of course, there’s a danger in knee-jerk trades, as he says.
Panthers GM Bill Zito says ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ is not the way teams operate. He mentioned the Cup Champions have a plan they’ve been working on all year that they keep looking at and they’re going to stick with that.
I got similar answers from Chris Patrick in Washington, Tom Fitzgerald in New Jersey, and [Tampa Bay's] Julien Brisebois, who was more succinct and just said “No”, when I asked him that.
Where do they go from here? We know the Leafs want a centre and potentially a third-pairing defenceman. The two Florida teams want to upgrade their D, the Devils want a centre and the Caps want a top-nine winger.
They will trade, but not because of Carolina.
How does the extended absence of leading scorer Kirill Kaprizov affect the Minnesota Wild’s plans at the trade deadline?
Kirill Kaprizov Minnesota Wild
Johnston: This is classic good news and bad news.
The good news is the 4 Nations break. So two of the four weeks that Kaprizov will be out after his surgery later this week is going to be a time where there are no games on the schedule for the Wild.
This is bad news because the Wild are a team hoping to be aggressive ahead of the trade deadline. But because Kaprizov is scheduled to be back ahead of the end of the regular season they can’t use his $9M salary to go out and acquire another player for their playoff run. With him being out, they’ve had to use LTIR space on Jonas Brodin, so they’re not accumulating daily cap space, which will make a trade more challenging.
Where do you think Team Canada goes for a replacement for defenceman Alex Pietrangelo?
Drew Doughty Los Angeles Kings
LeBrun: I spoke with Team Canada GM Don Sweeney on Tuesday and, as usual, he won’t get into names. However, I did press him on Drew Doughty because of the unique situation he’s in. Doughty hasn’t played all year and Sweeney said obviously they will watch Doughty’s play very closely when he does return, which is imminent.
There are other candidates as well. In terms of the kind of replacement player he did confirm that the role that player will have, the kind of minutes Pietrangelo was going to play, could affect the kind of player they’re going to take. To me, that says that a guy like Chris Tanev, perhaps, in a shutdown role, has a chance.
Dreger: We should also expect the NHL and NHLPA to announce some details on the 2028 World Cup of Hockey at the upcoming 4 Nations Face-Off. We know that the NHL and PA are moving forward without the involvement of the IIHF, at least for now. The IIHF has a meeting next week so perhaps there will be some reaction there.
As far as the World Cup is concerned in 2028, as CJ talked about a month or so ago, it still looks like they’re looking at an eight-team tournament, we’re not sure about Russia. They’re hoping for some kind of play-in tournament in September, so they’re making progress at this stage.