Larkin: How player agents manage their clients on trade deadline day
Sometimes a game of telephone really is a game of telephone, metaphors be damned. On trade-deadline day, the chaos is so constant, the pace so frenetic, that communication breakdowns happen over the phone. The results can be damaging, and it’s often the players’ agents cleaning up the mess.
Take what happened to one of Octagon Hockey agent and co-managing director Allan Walsh’s clients, whom we’ll call Player X, several years back when a GM called him roughly 15 minutes before the 3:00 p.m. ET deadline.
“Just a heads up – we’re trading for Player X,” the GM said. “It’s going down now.”
“Is it done?” Walsh asked.
“My assistant GM’s on the phone right now, finishing it up,” the GM said.
OK, Walsh thought. Time to notify Player X. Walsh called him up and delivered the news. The player was absolutely floored.
Walsh called the GM of Player X’s existing team for confirmation of the trade and got a text: “Working on something, will call you in a bit.”
Curious. The deadline came and went. It didn’t raise alarm bells immediately. The NHL’s Central Registry typically has a backlog of trade calls to process, many of them often filed in the final minutes leading up to the deadline. The Central Registry has a checklist of requirements each team must meet for a trade to be approved, from salary-cap compliance to roster-size considerations.
This time, however, the delay wasn’t about the typical waiting in the queue. Something had gone wrong. It turns out there was a late disagreement, and the trade for Player X had actually fallen through. The deal, then, was never done in the first place. The GM of Player X’s “new team” called Walsh to apologize after the fact.
“A player was traded and untraded within 45 minutes,” Walsh said.
These are the types of happenings agents must deal with on deadline day. They’re responsible for their players’ fates and well-being, and deadline day is the juncture during which there is the least control over them. How do agents go about keeping their players calm and informed during the most hectic day of the hockey calendar year?
Step 1 is to prioritize. If an agent has, for example, a superstar player in the middle of his prime, captaining a powerhouse team, said player will not require babysitting on deadline day. He’s going nowhere. The focus must be on the pending UFAs and/or players nearing the ends of their contracts – and, within those subsets, players on bad teams expected to sell veterans for picks and prospects.
“Players generally would be checking in to see I’ve heard anything or talked to people day by day,” said Will Sports Group agent and founder Ian Pulver. “But the volume of touch points with clients that are unrestricted and are being considered in the rumor mill is a lot higher.”
Keeping the communication going is key, Walsh explains, as the worst thing an agent can do on deadline day is be unreachable to a stressed-out player. To best facilitate clean information flow, Walsh builds a regimented setup with his staff. Being on the West Coast, he’s up at 4:00 a.m, and it’s “all hands on deck” with his employees as he wants every call answered quickly. The calls are tiered by importance, and he has the highest-priority ones routed directly to him.
So who’s calling? The players are a given. The hype around the deadline is undeniable, and many players have a hard time ignoring the news cycle that day. According to The Sports Corporation agent and CEO Gerry Johansson, some players catch wind of rumors in their dressing rooms. For Pulver, it’s the Canadian media juggernaut stirring the pot the most.
“There’s a lot of extra hype built over trade deadline, that is to some degree not necessary but at the same time understandable, because it captures the attention of the hockey world, especially in Canada,” Pulver said. “It’s become almost like a national holiday. So it’s heightened awareness throughout the league, which is comprised of the majority of teams being in the United States, but all the players know the Canadian networks.”
Agents will field calls from GMs and assistant GMs, too, and not just to be informed of trades. The GMs might check in on any desired clients who have no-movement clauses or modified no-trade clauses and see if they’re willing to waive them. Teams also like to perform due diligence on trade targets who don’t have any restrictions on their movement. A player might have no ability to block a trade, but, as Pulver explains, a prospective team will still call an agent to (a) gauge how happy that player would be to play for their team and (b) get a read on his odds of re-signing with the new team.
Once a trade does happen, the agents’ phones continue to ring, but it’s not just the players and teams calling at that point. Often, it’s a member of a traded player’s family if he’s married and/or has kids. In a sense, the player has the easier job, because, as Johansson explains, he’ll arrive to a new dressing room and usually know a couple guys on his new team. The rink is home wherever the rink is. The family’s life can get thrown into disarray, though. An agent will often field deadline-day calls from a spouse with questions about managing money or mortgages or the kids’ school.
“Often times, if you leave tomorrow morning, your wife and kids are still in your house or your apartment,” Johansson said. “Are they going to go with you? Are they going to stay? Do they have school? There are a lot of parts.”
That’s why, in the minutes and hours after a trade does go down, the agents are extremely busy. They work closely with the team services department on the traded player’s new franchise. That means setting up flights and hotels, getting equipment shipped, or other any little detail that must be dealt with after a player’s life is uprooted.
“I’ll get the call: ‘Where is the player right now? How quickly can he make it to the airport? Here are the flights. What do you think is best?’ And we work on that together,” Walsh said. “It’s very collaborative. If you’re booking a flight and the player is, for whatever reason, and hour from home at a school event, many times the player just isn’t sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring. He’s just living his life that day, and it may take some time. Sometimes a player will say to me, ‘I want to go pick up my kids and school and let them know what’s going on, and I’d really like to fly out tomorrow morning instead of tonight.’ You communicate that back, and many times teams are very flexible with a reasonable accommodation to when you make it out.”
For the most part, the agents and team services make the transition smooth for any traded player. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t occasional fires to put out. If there’s any delay in communication or a player isn’t immediately reachable, it’s possible he’s not the first to find out about a deal. The media might get to it first. Johansson remembers struggling to reach a traded client one year – because he had an off day and was fishing in the middle of a remote lake.
But those are the exceptions. When players navigate the turbulent waters of deadline day, the agents act as the skippers – not in control of whatever waves await, but committed to steer their passengers through and keep them calm.
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