Avalanche, Blues biggest winners of 2026 Trade Deadline
A few days after the NHL Trade Deadline slammed shut, it’s starting to become a little bit clearer where teams stand coming out of the chaos.
While the end-of-season results and the next several years will eventually determine the genuine winners and losers from Friday’s transactions, the first impressions and instant results remain important as well.
On Monday’s episode of Daily Faceoff Live, hosts Tyler Yaremchuk and Carter Hutton broke down why they think the Colorado Avalanche and St. Louis Blues are the biggest winners from this year’s trade deadline.
Tyler Yaremchuk: Who are the trade deadline winners and losers? Everyone had the weekend to sit on what their teams did, and I’ll be honest, I’m having a really hard time looking around the NHL and finding winners of this deadline
I think you could sit there and say Colorado got Nazem Kadri, and they didn’t pay a ton to get them. That Kadri deal looks great, so Colorado improved down the middle, and it is going to make them that much more difficult to beat four times in a seven-game series.
I also kind of sit there and go, like, all right, Colorado, if you thought you could get Kadri, do you maybe want to redo that Nic Roy trade? It feels like they got a little bit desperate and gave up a first-round pick for Roy, because they felt like they weren’t going to get Kadri, then they went and got Kadri anyway. So it feels like they spent a lot on a guy in Roy, who, I know you said scored over the weekend, but like he’s a fourth-line center for you now, and pretty clearly a fourth-line center, and you paid a first-round pick for him. So I have a really hard time finding a team that I would label as a true winner. Is there anyone whom you really like?
Carter Hutton: I like Colorado in the sense of being a team trying to win the cup right now. There’s no first-round pick, there’s whatever we gave up, but this is our chance to try to win the cup while we have Cale Makar at his salary number, while we have a healthy Nathan MacKinnon, and our defense is good, so they’re going for right? It is what it is, and we’ll see, because that Central Division is loaded.
The team for me that I thought was kind of sneaky, like getting rid of a few players I know they didn’t move on from Jordan Kyrou or Roberty Thomas but after the Colton Parayko shenanigans and publicity of everything that’s gone on, he’s able to go and just make a move where he moves out Justin Faulk, and he moves out Brayden Schenn, he acquires some picks. I think for Doug Armstrong, the important factor here is that this is his last year in St. Louis as well. I think that’s an important factor here, too, that he was good enough to set this team in the right space for them to start the rebuild, and I think for them, just with everything that had gone on, that’s a pretty good pick.
You can catch the full trade deadline breakdown following the weekend on Monday’s show right here…