Gear: The Romance of the Deal
It’s Valentine’s Day, so maybe all the love in the air got me thinking. Making a trade in the NHL is a bit like finding a date to the high school prom.
To consummate the deal, you’ve got to lay a lot of groundwork, put a shine on your best traits and probably strike out a few times before you find the one who says yes. If you don’t play the game right, you might find yourself dancing alone while your buddies stroll by with their new dates.
I’ve been through enough trade deadlines to see the parallels. NHL GMs will start to play the field, flaunting their assets and looking to see who might have some interest in what they bring to the table.
Once they find a few prospective partners that will give them the time of day, they will start the more serious courtship. And then, they pop the question and hope they have found their match.
It’s all very romantic.
If they hadn’t started to do so before the All-Star break, GMs will now spend time on the phone with every other GM in the league, looking for cues as to whether there is potential to come together before the March 21 deadline.
At this point, with exactly five weeks until the deadline, GMs are pretty cagey. There will be a lot of idle chatter, a lot of complimenting each other for what has gone right with their teams, and expressions of dismay for what has gone wrong. Lots of “Player X sure has had a nice season” or “You sure caught a tough break with the injury to Player Y.”
In the early stages, it’s rare that a GM will come right out and just tell another GM, “I’m interested in your third line center.”
That would be too strong an indication of intent, and likely cause the target to build up a high asking price. It’s much more likely that a GM would downplay intention and make the general statement, such as “I’m probably not going to make any moves, but I might look for another center for depth.”
Then they will look for cues as to whether the actual target 3C could possibly be available. These initial calls are about rapport-building and about soliciting information as to who might be actively shopped, who might become available for the right deal and who is untouchable.
Once the fact-finding is done and it becomes more clear who is buying, who is selling and who is standing pat, it’s then time to zero in on those prom date targets. At this point, the GM calls will start to get more serious, and it becomes more clear which pieces each side may be looking to part with.
The questions now become more focused: “What would you want back for Player X?” or “Would you consider moving Player Y?”
The tricky part is being able to interpret the response. Sometimes “I’d be looking for a mid-second round pick back in the deal” means just that. Sometimes, it means I am actually looking for a high third and I’d probably settle for a fourth. In other words, I’m interested and hoping you’ll pick me up in a limo, but if I don’t get any better offers, your dad’s pick-up will do.
Sometimes a GM will bring up a player’s name that the other GM didn’t expect to be available. It may seem odd that the prom king is willing to dump the prom queen, but for whatever reason, it hasn’t worked out, and you have to be ready to take your shot. Or, it could be a red flag. Maybe it’s a player with some off-ice issues or internal conflict. Time to dig in with your scouts. Maybe even have your equipment manager call the other team’s equipment manager to casually ask about a guy’s character. Equipment managers see and hear everything.
Where there appears to be interest, two GMs may talk on the phone two or three times per day for several days. Deals can evolve as one side wears down the other.
Persistence can pay off. One GM was known in our office as “The Crow,” because he would peck away at a deal proposal, trying to cut it down around the edges. Another was dubbed “The Brain” because he would come up with a long treatise to explain why his deal made sense for your team. There was also “The Kid” (not because he was young) and “The Riverboat Gambler.”
You get the idea.
GMs and their front office staff will usually dream up a dozen or so trades that seemingly make perfect sense to both sides. A lot of “Who says no?” conversations.
These days, it’s about making the money work as much as it is about finding the right pieces to exchange. The complications of the salary cap mean every deal usually has some sort of extra piece, a player that probably wouldn’t have been included in a deal, but is required to balance the cap.
Yet even when you have considered every aspect of both teams’ caps and matched the money and the player profile a trade partner is looking to add, it’s amazing how few of the brilliant ideas cooked up in a war room are well received by the other team.
That’s why it’s important for a front office team to just keep generating scenarios and potential offers for their GM to lob across the table. Like the prom, if the first prospect says they just aren’t that into you, it’s time to either up the ante or move on to the next potential partner.
Even when the offers get serious and a deal is close, GMs are almost always non-committal in their responses. “Let me think about that” or “Let me talk to my staff” are familiar refrains. In prom parlance, that can mean any of the following:
1. “I have no interest in going to the prom with you, but I am feigning interest in order to keep you thinking there’s a chance, because I don’t want you to ask my best friend either.”
2. “I am somewhat interested, but I am going to come back and ask for dinner and a movie as well.”
3. “I have to get approval and money from my dad first.”
4. “I want to discuss this with my friends first. They know some of your friends better than I do and I want to get their assessment of whether they would be good to hang out with.”
You can decipher those codes.
The last 24 hours of a trade deadline can be very intense. A deal you have been working on for several days or weeks can be right there for the taking, but the trade partner may still be dangling it front of another team, looking for something just a little better.
If you are too greedy, the deal can be lost; if you aren’t greedy enough, you lose anyway. I have seen deals come down to the final two or three minutes, with frantic phone calls back and forth with multiple GMs before someone finally capitulates and consents to the deal.
Whenever that happens, the GM who gets the deal can breathe a sigh of relief while the manager or managers who missed out are left to ponder what could have been.
There are times when I have been shocked at how little value there is for a particular player, and just as often, I have been shocked by how much a team may give up for another player. Mismatched trades happen, just like mismatched couples, so it’s about putting in the work to know when there may be an opportunity to punch above your weight class and get that date you never thought would say yes.
At the end of the day, it is almost always better to go to the prom with someone than to miss out on the dance. Unless of course, your date ends up having two left feet. If that’s the case, hopefully you haven’t committed to the relationship past prom – and you can start looking for a summer fling.
____
Chris Gear joined Daily Faceoff in January after a 12-year run with the Vancouver Canucks, most recently as the club’s Assistant General Manager and Chief Legal Officer. Before migrating over to the hockey operations department, where his responsibilities included contract negotiations, CBA compliance, assisting with roster and salary cap management and governance for the AHL franchise, Gear was the Canucks’ vice president and general counsel.
Click here to read Gear’s other Daily Faceoff stories.