Every year general managers scramble to do last minute shopping at the NHL trade deadline in hopes of acquiring a piece or two to put their team over the top, or at least help ensure they’ll qualify for the playoffs.
While every now and then a move pays off in a big way – take Pittsburgh acquiring Marian Hossa and Pascal Dupuis for pennies just prior to the 2008 trade deadline – there are many more examples where a general manager overplayed his hand and set the franchise back as a result.
Obviously some cases are more extreme than others, but there is no shortage of bad moves made at the deadline every season.
Take the 2014-15 trade deadline, for example.
The Pittsburgh Penguins parted with a promising young blue liner in Simon Despres in order to gain some more experience on the back end with Ben Lovejoy. The latter is serviceable, but the former is inarguably the better player and is eight years younger to boot.
That’s not an absolute disaster of a trade, but with an already mediocre Penguins’ blue line thinning out even more due to injuries, you bet they’d like to have that one back.
A more extreme example would be the Detroit Red Wings parting with forward Mattias Janmark, defenseman Mattias Backman and a 2nd round pick in exchange for Erik Cole and a conditional 3rd.
Fast forward a year and Cole, who tallied six points in 11 games with the Wings, had to retire due to a serious back injury.
Meanwhile Janmark just put the finishing touches on his first regular season where he scored 15 goals and tallied 29 points.
The 2nd round pick turned into a promising prospect in Roope Hintz, who was a key contributor for Finland’s Gold Medal winning team at the most recent World Juniors.
Not all deadline moves are bad, obviously, but with just one Stanley Cup winner every year, the prices teams pay to add to their roster only to come up short can lead to problems moving forward.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the five worst trades from the 2016 NHL trade deadline.