On the New Jersey Devils …
- Tom Gulitti of The Record: Devils were three points out of playoff spot before the deadline yesterday. GM Ray Shero.
“If we were in a playoff spot, I don’t think I would have done that,” Shero admitted of the Stempniak trade.
Still, while saying he had to be, “realistic to where we are,” Shero insisted, “It doesn’t mean we’re giving up on anything.”
The Devils now have nine draft picks after yesterday’s moves, with six in the first four rounds. Shero made it clear he wasn’t going to be in the rental market.
“Would it be for a rental or an expiring contract? Probably not,” Shero said. “But, I think in terms of picks for players that are under contract, I did try to do that, but under a contract that we would like to move forward with possibly or might be moving forward. But, that didn’t happen. Maybe that will happen later on. As we know, the number of draft picks we do have over the next couple or three years, that bodes well for drafting players or moving those picks potentially, but they’re assets, for sure. We’ve got cap space, which is great.
“In terms of a rental, you saw some of the prices on the rentals and I spelled out from the day I was hired and (head coach) John Hynes was hired the direction we wanted to go and where we wanted to be in three, four or five years and the short-term fixes weren’t really going to make it. We traded two draft picks to get Kyle Palmieri and, obviously, that made sense and certainly has paid off, but even when we made the deal, to me, it made sense because of the style he played, he was under contract for a year and then controlled after that for a little while. So, stuff like that made sense to me then and moving forward.”
Shero said that they were never closer to trading pending UFA defenseman David Schlemko, though there was interest.
On the St. Louis Blues …
- Jeremy Rutherford of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Blues GM Doug Armstrong wanted to add a forward before the deadline, but knew he might have to get creative due to their cap situation.
“It wasn’t the creativity as much as the asking price to get creative,” he said. “We felt it was overextended by what we wanted.”
The Blues didn’t add anything yesterday, and only brought in Anders Nilsson in the days leading up to the deadline.
“If we’re going to use a second-round pick or higher, we wanted a player that would be inserted into our group of nine (forwards), or with a first-round pick, our group of six,” Armstrong said. “Any player that we were going to trade for, giving that type of pick, had to play in our group of nine when we’re healthy.
“Then obviously it had to be a salary that fit in that too. You’re looking for a good player that’s not making much, and those are hard to find in today’s NHL.”
Loui Eriksson might have been one of the players the Blues were interested. He would have cost a high draft pick and they would have had to move some salary around.
For Jonathan Drouin, the Lightning had been asking for Robby Fabbri or Colton Parayko.
