It Passed With a Whimper

Trading deadline came and went without much excitement yesterday in the NHL. It's always difficult to predict this early, especially when a lot of the trades were for picks, but the biggest pickup would seem to be Brad Richards heading to Dallas. Richards has had proven success, winning the cup a few years back and may be just the thing to put Dallas over the edge. With the Red Wings struggling lately, the Stars have come way back and still have a real shot at winning the West down the stretch and Richards could be just the piece to make that happen. The other big winner yesterday was Pittsburgh picking up Marion Hossa, Pascal Dupuis, and Hal Gill from Atlanta and Toronto. I'm not ready to declare this a clear victory though because Hossa is in the last year of his contract and Pittsburgh actually had to give up quite a bit to get these guys. The Penguins now won't have a pick in the first two rounds of the draft this year where they've been quite successful the last few years in building a solid young heart to their team. We'll see how that effects them over the next few, because I don't think Hossa and Gill are going to be enough to get Pittsburgh the kind of immediate playoff success they're hoping for.

Some trades that I quite enjoyed were Wade Belak going from Toronto to Florida and Marty Lapointe going from Chicago to Ottawa each for a bag of pucks and a water bottle. I take a sick kind of pleasure in seeing Lapointe, a guy that left Detroit because he wanted more money rather than another chance to win, fail in his last two cities while playing out that huge contract.

In other NHL news, the Wings blew another one last night. They finally managed to put a couple of pucks in the net, but hanging onto a one goal lead with two minutes left was too much pressure, so they fired a puck over the glass for a delay of game penalty and gave up the tying goal. What followed, was Edmonton's record 13th win of the season in a shootout where Detroit went back to normal and couldn't score on Garon. I have to wonder a bit what Babcock was thinking though putting Jonathan Ericsson, a defenceman in just his third game of the season, up first in the shootout. With the number of guys Detroit has who should be scoring but aren't lately, what better opportunity is there than during a shootout to get one of them going? Chalk up another "L". At least we got a point for this one.