Only three weeks to go until the National Hockey League trade deadline and usually by now somebody has made a move.
Calgary Flames general manager Darryl Sutter, for example, believes in pre-emptive strikes, figuring the price just goes up the closer you get to the deadline and the bidding for scarce players can get ridiculously high. Two years ago, Sutter made a splashy move weeks before the deadline, getting Brad Stuart and Wayne Primeau from Boston for Andrew Ference and Chuck Kobasew.
It was the same for Carolina Hurricanes general manager Jimmy Rutherford in 2006, when he landed the final piece of the Stanley Cup puzzle, Doug Weight, on the second last day of January. As other teams tried to upgrade their shortcomings at the deadline, the Hurricanes had had Weight for a month already, learning their system and getting used to his new home.
Unless you count Dan Fritsche for Erik Reitz, or Mike Brown for Norm McIvor, nothing close to that has happened this time around, leading one to ask: Is this a precursor of things to come at the deadline?
If so, how will the folks at TSN fill those 10 hours of television coverage if the No. 1 deal of the day is Colby Armstrong returning to the Pittsburgh Penguins for a mid-round pick?
Naturally, it won't unfold that way, if only because Brian Burke is now running the greatest show on ice, the Toronto Maple Leafs, as their general manager. Burke essentially gave one of his more marketable assets, Nikolai Antropov, his walking papers this week, saying Antropov hadn't played well enough to warrant a contract extension.
In the past, GMs would exchange this sort of information in private at their semi-annual meetings in Florida a few days before the deadline. This year, with the meetings pushed back two weeks, going to the airwaves to put a for-rent sign around Antropov saves Burke all those pesky text-messaging charges.
Moreover, because of the tight playoff races, the number of confirmed sellers is limited to five teams, all in the Eastern Conference -- Toronto, Ottawa, Tampa Bay, Atlanta and the New York Islanders. In the West, where the gap between the 15th-place-but-surging St. Louis Blues and the teams that co-hold the final playoff spot, Vancouver and Edmonton, is just six points, no one is in confirmed player-dumping mode.
This plays right into Burke's hands, the only GM really bold enough to show his cards early and thus make himself the focal point as the deadline approaches. The Leafs knew they'd be bad this year, which makes it easier to sell the tough medicine that's about to come.
Antropov, Alexei Ponikarovsky, Tomas Kaberle and anyone not named Luke Schenn may be heading for the exits as Burke strips the team down to its foundations and then rebuilds it in his own image.
Just how Burke plays his cards remains to be seen, but it is likely he will hold them right until the bitter end, anticipating he can extract the highest possible asking price for a player if he can get motivated suitors trying to outbid one another.
So there are the Penguins, for example, wildly underachieving this year after qualifying for the Stanley Cup final last season -- getting that far partly because they extracted Marian Hossa from the Thrashers in the final minutes before the 2008 deadline.
Unless the Thrashers dramatically shift gears and put Ilya Kovalchuk in play at this year's deadline, or the persistent rumors of Jaromir Jagr's return to the NHL are true, there will be no player of Hossa's caliber on the move in March.
Accordingly, if Pittsburgh wanted an upgrade on the wings (and it does), Antropov might be the most attractive commodity out there. He can play the wing (as he demonstrated last year), and in Pittsburgh he wouldn't have to carry the puck into the zone, because they have Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin to handle those duties.
Antropov's best work is done in front of the net, where he can use his size (6-6, 230 pounds) and reach to best advantage.
With all the uncertainty surrounding this year's trade deadline, you can really only be sure of one thing. From now until March 4, Burke will be a closet fan of the Blues, Nashville, Phoenix and Columbus. He wants them all to stay within a few points of eighth place in the West, so if they do anything at the deadline, they're adding, not subtracting.
Because if it shakes out the way it looks -- limited supply versus significant demand -- that will make Burke's handful of pawns look like shiny kings on that one crazy day when all reason disappears from the frontal lobes of NHL general managers.
(Contact Eric Duhatschek at eduhatschek@globeandmail.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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