Some final thoughts on….the 2025 NHL trade deadline

Whelp. We made it through yet another trade deadline. The roster are set (for the most part) and roughly three-quarters of the NHL seems to be in contention for the sixteen playoff spots available. If nothing else it should be an interesting race to the end. As usual the Tampa Bay Lightning were in the thick of it, and may have been partly responsible for setting the high prices we saw over the 24 hours heading into last Friday\'s 3:00 PM deadline. So, are the Lightning a better team on Monday March 10th than they were on Monday March 3rd?

The short answer is yes. Adding Oliver Bjorkstrand and Yanni Gourde makes the Tampa Bay Lightning a better team than they were with Cameron Atkinson (who was assigned to Syracuse), Mikey Eyssimont, a 2025 second-round pick, a 2026 first-round pick, and a 2027 first-round pick. At least for this season. As for future Tampa Bay Lightning teams, well, there is plenty of time to figure that.

At some point, Julien BriseBois might go the Pittsburgh Penguins route where he flips his players for draft picks and younger players. Kyle Dubas currently has a bank of 19 picks in the next two drafts with 12 of them in the first three rounds. After missing the playoffs this year, and likely missing it this year, Dubas is trying to retool on the fly as he has kept his rapidly-aging core of Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang, along with (for now) Erik Karlsson and Brian Rust.

The Lightning aren\'t there yet. With Andrei Vasilevskiy back to being a top-tier goaltender, Ryan McDonagh providing a steadying presence on defense, and Nikita Kucherov leading one of the top-ranked offenses they have worked their way into being contenders in the Eastern Conference. Are they Stanley Cup favorites? No, but they have shaved their odds down over the course of the season and the two players acquired have helped with that.

We talk about playoff and Stanley Cup windows all the time, but they are nebulous constructs. There is no rigid timeline for a team\'s phase of contention. Situations change, key players get hurt, other franchises accelerate at a faster than expected pace, salary caps get frozen. If there was a clear checklist for a team\'s ascension to glory, a general manager\'s job would probably be a lot easier. In the end it\'s, at best, an educated guess if a team should push it\'s chips to the middle of the table and make a deal like the Lightning did last week.

Circumstances change, as do team\'s futures. What is true right now, might not be true on July 1st when free agency opens. If the Lightning flame out in the first round maybe Mr. BriseBois alters his outlook and switches direction. However, right now, the Lightning are one of the top five teams in the Eastern Conference, and have just as good as shot as any other to advance to the Conference Finals. They may not be a Stanley Cup favorite, but there aren\'t any really dominant teams in the East, so it\'s an easy decision to go for it this year.

What Mr. BriseBois did at this deadline was what he always does, make the decision he felt was necessary to win today, tomorrow be damned. Yes, he stood up after the trade and told the media that the deal makes sense for next year with Bjorkstrand under contract, and that they will make a run at possibly keeping Gourde as well, but it felt kind of hollow to be honest. While this deal had some similarities to the trades he pulled off in 2019 that led to back-to-back Stanley Cups there are some stark differences.

The similarities - the Lightning parted with two first round picks for two players slotted to play in their middle-six. Instead of the second-round pick and Eyssimont they sent out this year, they parted with prospect Nolan Foote and Anthony Greco. So, some equivalency can be drawn for what they lost in exchange for Barclay Goodrow and Blake Coleman. The main difference is the ages of the players they brought in. Goodrow was in his age 26 season while Coleman was in his age 29 season. Both had a year of control left, and the potential for the Lightning to re-sign them after that year.

With Bjorkstrand at 29 and Gourde at 33 how much future is left for them to give the Bolts? More importantly, how expensive would it be to keep Gourde past this season and Bjorkstrand past next season? So while there is some truth to what Mr. BriseBois said, there isn\'t a particularly long runway with these acquisitions. That can be dealt with this summer though.

We\'re still trying to focus on the now, and for the now, he did an admirable job of plugging the two holes that most of us have mentioned throughout the season. He brough in a depth center in Gourde and a winger who can score in Bjorkstrand. Were they the best solutions to his problems or could he have allocated his resources better? Honestly, the answer to that question will come after the dust is settled and the Stanley Cup is awarded. If Gary Bettman is handing it to Victor Hedman, than yes Gourde and Bjorkstrand were the right solution. If the commissioner is handing it to someone else, than no, no it wasn\'t.

We can most wholeheartedly agree that it was an overpay. However, we knew that going in. It\'s the way BriseBois does business. He finds the players he wants and does whatever he needs to do to make the deal happen. Even better if the opposing GM is happy with draft picks.

\"I\'d rather have a line-up full of good players than a bank of a ton of draft picks. Ultimately what we\'re trying to do is win hockey games. We want to win a lot of hockey games. We want to win a lot of games this season, next season, every season.\"

That\'s how he put it after the trade. To be honest, that\'s the mindset to have now, especially if he thinks this team can make it to the Eastern Conference or Stanley Cup Finals. Why hold a lottery ticket for tomorrow when you can cash it in today?

We at Raw Charge are convinced that what happened in the 2018-19 playoffs haunts and drives him in every move that he makes. The Lightning ran through the regular season at a record pace and he sat by without making any big moves to strengthen the team for the playoffs. Then they got swept and he was left with the lingering thought of, \"could I have made a deal that would have changed the outcome\"? From that moment on, he wasn\'t going to let that happen again.

In his book The Franchise , Craig Custance had a chance to talk to Mr. BriseBois about his career and how he manages the Lightning. One quote sums things up pretty well,

\"We got it to a place where I was more comfortable living with the regret of doing the trade and not having it work out than not doing the trade, not winning, and then forever asking myself, \'What if I\'d done the trade, would I be a Stanley Cup winner?\'\"

They were talking specifically about the Goodrow and Coleman deals, but it applies to the Tanner Jeannot deal, the David Savard deal, and every deal he does. He\'s not going to lose by being cautious, pretty much the GM equivalent of the old \"Safe is Death\" mantra Lightning fans were familiar with during the John Tortorella era.

A first-round pick has a certain aura about it, but it seems general managers are valuing it less and less every year, especially if it allows them to pick up a piece they need immediately. No one knows how they\'re going to turn out. The Lightning\'s 2020 pick? San Jose used that to draft Ozzy Wiesblatt. Almost five years after the pick he has played four games at the NHL level and they were for Nashville. The other 2020 pick (originally the Rangers) was used by New Jersey to draft Shakir Mukhamadullin, who has three games of NHL experience, also with another team.

You never know how picks are going to turn out, so why not trade them for a more known commodity? Mr. BriseBois could have held onto the picks and drafted similar players and the Lightning\'s prospect pool might be ranked higher by the experts, but there is a good chance that those banners that hang in Amalie Arena wouldn\'t be there.

Sometimes the deals work and they win as it did in 2020 and 2021. Sometimes it works and they don\'t win - Brandon Hagel in 2022. And sometimes, and these are the times people remember the most, it doesn\'t work and they don\'t win - Tanner Jeannot. (We would argue that the Anthony Duclair trade worked and they didn\'t win, the Matt Dumba trade didn\'t work).

Could he have filled the holes and not given up as much as he did? That\'s hard to say without being in the room when the deals are done. Does Nashville trade Gus Nyquist for a second-rounder to the Lightning or do they hold out for more? Would Brock Nelson have been a better fit if they could have gotten him for a first and a prospect? Again, who knows? The long-term effect of Mr. BriseBois\' trading style is that his brethren are going to use that to their advantage. They\'re not cutting him any deals.

One thing about his trading history is that the Lightning have been pretty good at identifying which prospects to include in deals. Some of the names they\'ve dealt are Nolan Foote, who is still a NHL/AHL tweener, Boris Katchouk, who passed through waivers multiple times and is in the AHL, Taylor Raddysh (who has found a role as a bottom-six forward with the Caps) wasn\'t retained by the worst team in the NHL, and Anthony Greco, who is currently playing in the KHL.

So, the fact that he didn\'t part with Isaac Howard, Ethan Gauther, or Dylan Duke lends us to believe that he values their future roles with the Lightning. It also made him more willing to let a future first-round pick go, knowing that the prospects they have will have a more immediate affect on the team than a kid who will be in juniors or college for the next three years at least.

In the end, the Lightning have roughly a 6.25% chance of winning the Stanley Cup, just like the other 15 teams that will make the playoffs (pretty sure that math works out). Sure, there are formulas and prediction models that might show otherwise, but they don\'t account for the pure randomness that is playoff hockey. It doesn\'t account for a star forward getting hurt or a goaltender going on a heater at just the right moment.

At some point it\'s going to end for the Lightning. And it\'s likely to end badly a la the Chicago Blackhawks. The franchise will bottom out and they\'ll have to rebuild. If and when that happens JBB probably won\'t be around for it, so it\'s in his interests to give the team the best shot at winning while they can . This deal may not keep the window open longer, but it does open it wider for this year.

Raw Charge

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