Lightning Manage NHL Trade Deadline Beautifully with Coburn, Connolly Deals

The final day of the 2015 NHL trade deadline got off to a roaring start, with Tampa Bay Lightning general manager Steve Yzerman pulling off two big trades. One move was a pretty typical trade-deadline maneuver, with the Lightning overpaying for a player who can help them in the here and now. The other saw Yzerman try to balance the scales, restocking the cupboard for years in the future.

In terms of winning the Stanley Cup this season, the Braydon Coburn trade with Philadelphia is clearly the more important of the two deals.

Unlike most of the names dealt in recent weeks, Coburn isn’t a rental player. The 6’5”, 220-pound rearguard is under contract for another season at what NHL Numbers has as a manageable $4.5 million cap hit. The 30-year-old has more than 600 games of regular-season experience and another 70 in the playoffs, and he finds the balance nicely between being a savvy veteran and still having tread on the tires.

Coburn has mostly settled into a defensive role in Philadelphia, and he’s awfully good at it. This season, which has been weaker than most of those preceding it, sees him simultaneously taking on the toughest competition and the toughest zone starts on the Flyers’ blue line. In other words, not only does he go head-to-head with the other team’s best lines, but his shifts generally start in the ugly end of the rink.

For good measure, he’s mostly done it while playing with reclamation project Nick Schultz. Incredibly, his shot metrics are only a touch below the team average, and he’s made Schultz look so good that Philadelphia gave the man a contract extension.

Mike Stobe/Getty Images

But before we write this off as another case of bad decision-making by the Flyers, let’s look at the haul they landed for a year-and-a-bit of Coburn. The link above shows Philadelphia adding first- and third-round draft picks in 2015, along with 24-year-old monster Radko Gudas (who combined for 22 points and 152 penalty minutes on the Lightning blue line last year). Not only did Philly general manager Ron Hextall add some good picks in a very deep draft, he even managed to bring in a reasonably competent young defender who fits the Flyers' style to a tee.

Yzerman had to be happy about getting his man, but that cost was so dear that one could make a case the Lightning might have been better off looking at a cheaper alternative. That’s probably one of the reasons Tampa Bay’s website details the Coburn deal together with a second trade, this one with Boston:

Brett Connolly isn’t exactly a write-off, but he had long since ceased to be a good fit with the Lightning. The sixth overall selection in the 2010 draft will turn 23 in May and has just 15 points in 50 games this season after spending most of last year in the AHL (where he scored just under one point per game). On a Tampa Bay team loaded to the gills with good young forwards, he was lost in a crowd despite his gifts.

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In exchange for a guy who has yet to carve out an NHL niche and is rapidly approaching the point in his career when one goes from prospect to suspect, the Lightning got a pretty princely sum from the Bruins. It’s not exactly “sixth overall pick” princely, but a pair of second-round selections goes a long way toward mitigating the damage to the team system caused by shipping away a first and a third in the Coburn deal.

In aggregate, that’s an awfully good day for the Lightning. Tampa Bay simultaneously loads up for a playoff run and restocks the cupboard with new futures to replace the ones sent down the line. Yzerman’s star has been rising around the league for several years now; this pair of deals isn’t going to do anything to discourage that trend.

Statistics courtesy of BehindTheNet.ca,Stats.Hockeyanalysis.com and NHL.com. 

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.