How the Salary Cap Has Made Once-Exciting NHL Trade Deadline a Dud

Trade deadline day, once the NHL's version of the all-day college kegger, now carries all the excitement of a life insurance seminar. 

Trades will still happen by the 3 p.m. ET deadline on Monday, but chances are even some of the most seasoned hockey reporters will scramble to Hockeydb.com to figure out just who some of the transacted names are. Some of the trades on last year's deadline day included such blockbusters as Mark Louis from the Arizona Coyotes to the New York Islanders for David Leggio and Karl Stollery from the Colorado Avalanche to the San Jose Sharks for Freddie Hamilton. 

Arguably, the biggest name traded on deadline day last year was...drum roll please...Braydon Coburn from the Philadelphia Flyers to the Tampa Bay Lightning for Radko Gudas and first- and third-round picks. Coburn is a nice player and helped the Lightning get to the Stanley Cup Finals, but we're not talking about a household name here.

In all, 24 trades happened on March 2 last year. That was more than years prior, when deadline day was more exciting. For instance, there were only a combined 29 trades on the deadline days of 2000 and 2001 (12 in 2000, 17 in 2001). 

Though the deadline days of past years lacked quantity, they delivered in terms of pure buzz. The reason, largely, was the lack of a salary cap.

"The cap has just made it a lot harder to make those bigger deals," Colorado general manager Joe Sakic said. "It's just too hard to make the numbers work under the cap."

While the big-name blockbusters didn't always go down on the actual day of the deadline, the fact is there used to be more deals involving marquee names close to the deadline than the post-cap era. Today's deadline deals involve more fringe players, the guys who can help out on the third line or the penalty kill.

Sakic remembers the few years when his Avs shocked the world with huge deals at or near the deadline. 

JAMES A. FINLEY/Associated Press

In 1999, the Avs won the Theo Fleury sweepstakes, acquiring the exciting, soon-to-be-unrestricted free agent from the Calgary Flames for a package that included Robyn Regehr. On March 6, 2000, eight days before the deadline, the Avs got Ray Bourque from the Boston Bruins. Three weeks before the March 13 deadline of 2001, the Avs got Rob Blake in a blockbuster with the Kings that saw Adam Deadmarsh go to L.A.

"You couldn't help but want to hear the latest trade gossip back then," Sakic said. "It was exciting for the fans, a little more nerve-wracking for the players. Today, I don't know. There are still deals, but you just don't see those big rental deals involving big names as much."

Younger players becoming eligible for unrestricted free agency sooner has also played a big role in making deadline day more of a dud. In the mid-90s, players couldn't go unrestricted until age 31, regardless of years of service. Now, players can go UFA after seven contractual years of pro service, meaning some can be UFA at age 25. Consequently, the best players are locked up with long-term deals before that happens, making for few big-name, end-of-contract players on the market. 

Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin, Jonathan Toews, Anze Kopitar, Patrick Kane are just a few of the younger star players who might have become too expensive for their respective teams in the past. Players literally went to the highest bidder when their contracts were expiring, but they can now be retained for the long term in a one-size-fits-all cap world.

That is probably a good thing for the health of the league, with great players staying with their first teams longer. But it has put a crimp into the excitement of trade deadline day.

This year, the Avs have already made what has actually been one of the bigger deals entering the deadline, getting Shawn Matthias from the Toronto Maple Leafs for a middle-round pick and prospect Colin Smith. 

Those are the kinds of deals that will permeate the deadline period, though that won't stop the rumors of some possible blockbusters. But those rumors mostly just draw snickers now from league general managers, including Sakic.

"You don't have the sell-offs like you used to have because, number one, teams can't afford to take on that much payroll, and number two, teams have to maintain a cap floor. You can't just sell off all your big contracts anymore," he said.

Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press/Associated Press

With Lightning captain Steven Stamkos off the trade market (for this season at least), the bigger names said to be available are older guys like Jiri Hudler, Radim Vrbata, Loui Eriksson, Andrew Ladd and Dale Weise. 

Try to contain the excitement.

Kane in trouble...again

It made for embarrassing headlines in Buffalo when the Sabres' Evander Kane recently missed a team practice due to oversleeping. His absence led to a one-game suspension by coach Dan Bylsma. He's still young, and everyone makes mistakes, but that's the type of headline people in Buffalo worried about after acquiring the talented power forward from the Winnipeg Jets last season.

This came on top of the late December headlines of Erie County prosecutors investigating Kane for a possible incident of sexual assault against a 20-year-old woman at the downtown Buffalo hotel where he lives. Kane's attorney, Paul J. Cambria, told the Buffalo News' Dan Herbeck last week he's still waiting for word from Erie County whether charges will be filed.

Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images

Kane has maintained his innocence and denied any wrongdoing in the incident, but he acknowledged poor behavior in oversleeping the February 15 practice, which came one day after he attended the NBA All-Star Game in Toronto. 

Moving forward for the rest of the regular season, Kane has his best chance to show he can be a leader in Buffalo. Ryan O'Reilly will be lost for three to four weeks with a lower-body injury. He was the team's best forward to that point, but Kane now has a chance to be the top guy every night. We'll see if he can meet that challenge.

Sabres management is paying him $6 million a year, so now is as good a time as any for Kane to show he's worth the money.

Torch passed in Minnesota

The Minnesota Wild won their first four games following the dismissal of coach Mike Yeo in favor of John Torchetti. One of the first things "Torch" did was to tell his players, per Hockey Central of Sportsnet, to stop thinking too much and focus on their own jobs.

That sounds simple, but some close to the Wild believe Yeo's message was just not getting through anymore to his players, partially over a complicated defensive system that took away too much focus from the offense's top players.

In an interview with the Star-Tribune's Michael Russo, Yeo also said there was a divide in the Wild dressing room between the older and younger players.

"It just felt like there were almost two groups. There were younger guys and there were the older guys. It wasn’t just a group," Yeo said.

NHL not caving on concussion suit

The conventional wisdom is that the NHL will eventually settle with the multiple plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit regarding concussions among ex-players—just like the NFL did in 2015. But that thinking is wrong-headed. "They're digging in for a real fight," said one attorney connected to the plaintiffs' side. The number of players signed on to the class-action suit, per Boston.com (via the Associated Press' Dave Campbell), was 106 as of February 6.

Avs-Wings (old) grudge match set to resume

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If you don't think the upcoming Colorado-Detroit alumni game means much to the participants, you haven't been paying attention to the teams' respective preparations. Wings alumni are practicing twice a day for the Friday game at Coors Field in Denver, while Avalanche legends such as Peter Forsberg have already flown in to the Mile High City to daily skate at altitude. Patrick Roy has even laced up the pads again, and Sakic is putting off a possible back surgery to tough it out against his old archrivals.

Meanwhile, Steve Yzerman and Brendan Shanahan, who, like Sakic, are busy running their respective current teams in management, have pledged to put on Red Wings gear again for this one. It might be more entertaining than the regular game the next day between the current Avs and Wings.

Adrian Dater covers the NHL for Bleacher Report