Teams may be thinking twice about allowing a potential trade partner to speak to a pending UFA about an extension
Sportsnet: Elliotte Friedman on 32 Thoughts: The Podcast – Canada Can’t Refuse Connor Bedard episode, on the idea of teams getting away from allowing teams to talk to a player about an extension before trading for them.
** NHLRumors.com transcription
Kyle Bukauskas: “And I thought the point you made too on radio, and this isn’t pertaining particularly to one team or one player. But just that whole idea, if you’re trading for somebody that’s on an expiring deal, that you may be looking at signing to an extension, the workflow, I guess, through all of that, in terms of, let’s make a deal first before you can talk to my guy if you want to sign them to a new contract, versus the other way around. The point you made, there was, was an interesting one.
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Friedman: “Well, so if anybody wasn’t listening to me on radio on Thursday, and shame on you if you weren’t. I remember talking to Craig Conroy after they made the Noah Hanifin deal with Vegas. And Craig Conroy said after that that it’s probably not the process he would want to do again. Because they gave Vegas permission, and even though they didn’t sign the extension as part of the deal, it didn’t take long for it to happen after.
So you can basically look at this and say, Vegas made that deal pretty much knowing what it would take to sign Hanifin, in the ballpark, and Hanifin’s representatives, Pat Brisson, knowing what Vegas wanted to do.
And when Vegas made that deal, I think people around, I remember people around it were kind of like, this is going to get done. Like there will be an extension here, and eventually it was.
And I remember Craig Conroy talked about it afterwards, and, and he said that if he was in that situation again, next time, he would change it. And he would make the trade he was happy with first, and then say, ‘Okay, you want to talk to this player about an extension? You do, you have that you have that power, you have that ability. But this, if you make an extension, this is the deal we’re agreeing to. It’s done.’
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And I actually, I had a GM call me after hearing that clip, and he said that that’s a lesson that I think a lot of us have learned. That sometimes you think it’s better, oh yeah, okay, you make it, you sign an extension with that team, and then we’ll work out a trade, and you’ve actually lost power. Then the team can say, ‘Hey, we’ve got an extension here. Where else you going to trade them to?
And so teams don’t like it that way. Now they reverse it. They do it the other way.”
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