NHL: In a Cap World, the No-Trade Clause No Longer Makes Any Sense

At lunch the other day, a friend of mine and I were trying to figure out exactly why the NHL trade deadline, and the few weeks preceding it, gets us so giddy.

About the second week of February, we find ourselves checking all the rumor blogs and major sports news sites almost hourly, looking for all the scuttlebutt and hot leads on who's going where.

We're constantly refreshing nhl.com's or tsn.ca's home page hoping for news of some big deal to replace whatever mundane headline was there before it.

We compared it to trading baseball or hockey cards as a kid.

You've got some guys you don't care about anymore, other guys you do, but hope you can trade for someone better, and a few players you'd almost trade your whole collection for if given the chance.

What was almost better than actually making these deals though, was speculating on who'd give up what for who and what your strategy was going to be to pry another guy's prized player away to complete your ultimate team.

It's the same thing we feel as adults now.

Even if our teams aren't even a part of any big deals, we still can't wait to get all the details on the major (even minor) trades, just so we can talk about who made the best moves, and even more so, the worst ones.

Though we were terrified the NHL salary cap imposed in 2005 would reduce the second best time of year in the NHL (please don't tell me you don't know what the best is), five years later, huge blockbuster deals are still being made (thank you, Brian Burke).

However, more frequently than in the years before the lockout, we keep seeing that team such and such is asking player so and so to waive his no-trade clause and/or provide a list of teams he's willing to go to.

Come on!

Where's the fun in that?  Where's the mystery?  Where's the excitement?

If you want to trade the guy, make the deal behind closed doors, let everyone speculate as to where he might go and then maybe, just maybe, surprise everyone with sending him some place no one ever imagined he'd go.

That's fun stuff.

But to hear, almost a month before the trade deadline, that Sheldon Souray will be traded to one of Anaheim, Los Angeles, Dallas, Philadelphia, Washington or the New York Rangers (hmm, someone likes good weather and a thriving night life) really ruins the fun for us trade junkies who find that speculating on who will go where is more than half the fun.

A player's NTC is intended to provide security and commitment to the player and the franchise he's signed with, but it often ends up being a stumbling block to shipping a player out when you need to rebuild your team.

More than this, it reveals the ridiculousness of making such a deal in the first place.

When you've got to ask for a mulligan on a player's contract, doesn't that tell you that you shouldn't have signed him to the one you did?

Though Sheldon Souray in Edmonton and Tomas Kaberle in Toronto are currently the two most prominent trade-baits with NTC's, before the trade deadline passes, there's bound to be a few more added to the mix.

By and large, NTC's are negotiated by the player and his agent, or thrown into a deal by a GM looking to sweeten the pot for a player who'd like some security.

But, in a cap world, can teams really afford to hand these things out anymore?

The cap has largely failed to bring about much of the change it was promised to bring, but one thing it has done is reveal which GM's are smarter than others.

In the previous non-capped NHL world, even if you'd like to trade a player with an NTC, you wouldn't be forced to do so to bring in another player via trade.

The salaries were largely irrelevant, there was no cap space to clear and, if you truly wanted to be done with a guy, you simply bought him out and went on with your life.

Now, if you're a struggling team seeking improvement, you typically looking to trade your more prominent players, not only for some good players coming the other way, but sometimes, merely to clear your cap space and start planning for the summer.

When you've signed such a player to a NTC contract, you've got to hope and pray he waives it and agrees to go to a team you can strike a deal with.

Were Souray and Kaberle really worth signing to a NTC?

No.

But, for some reason, Kevin Lowe (the former GM of the Oilers) and John Ferguson Jr. (the former GM of the Maple Leafs) thought they were.

Not surprisingly, they are no longer in charge of their respective teams and their replacements are now trying to undo what they've done.

In a league this competitive, with a salary cap this hard, there are less than a handful of players that are worth, let alone deserve, a no-trade clause as part of their contract.

These are players like Sydney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin, and Martin Brodeur; players you wouldn't trade anyway, so why not give them an NTC to help them sleep better from October to March?

However, NTC's given to lesser players, more often than not, handcuff teams, reveal deals that shouldn't have been made to begin with, and last (and almost least), ruin the fun that only increases with the approaching NHL trade-deadline.

In a cap world, the days of the NTC should be numbered.