Working the NHL trade market is often about manipulating pressure points, with the most obvious one being the trade deadline. The reason that date is in place is to create urgency, to force NHL general managers to stop bargaining and just make a decision.
But sometimes, if you are paying attention, you can artificially manufacture a pressure point. It is difficult not to see the Montreal Canadiens trading Sean Monahan to the Winnipeg Jets on Friday as an example of that.
The Canadiens got the Jets’ first-round pick in the 2024 draft in return, and they will also get their third-round pick in 2027 if the Jets win the Stanley Cup this spring. But simply getting that first-round pick for Monahan at this early stage of the trade cycle was a deft maneuver by Canadiens general manager Kent Hughes, and it appears as though he used another trade to create the leverage necessary to get it done.
The Calgary Flames trading Elias Lindholm to the Vancouver Canucks on Wednesday evening provided the context for Hughes to potentially create that pressure point.
“Yes, I think the teams that were in the race for Lindholm shifted towards Sean. That accelerated things, for sure,” Hughes said Friday. “In terms of whether that had an impact on the return, we did our homework, we had a good idea of where the market was going.
“So when we got our price, we were ready to do it.”
According to our Thomas Drance and Julian McKenzie, the Canucks made a significant offer for Lindholm on Saturday morning, Jan. 27, leading Conroy to update the other teams involved with Lindholm on the situation.
On Sunday, the Jets put defenceman Declan Chisholm on waivers, losing him to the Minnesota Wild on Monday, and Jets general manager Kevin Chevaldayoff didn’t really deny that move was related to what was going on with Lindholm.
“There’s a lot of intertwining things that happened over the course of this week,” he said. “Obviously cap space is something that, depending on which directions you go with some things, you might need.”
Earlier, Cheveldayoff also acknowledged how the Monahan trade talks were ramped up as a result of the Lindholm trade.
“I think the urgency, or the timing of things was accelerated by the activity over the start of the break here,” he said. “Fortunately for us, we had some conversations early yesterday morning and culminated very late last night with pretty much an agreement.”
That urgency was due to just how much the Jets coveted Monahan.
“We believe this is a good fit,” Chevaldayoff said. “If there wasn’t a fit out there, there wasn’t going to be a trade. We were just fortunate that timing and opportunity intertwined, and we were able to make it happen.”
Does that mean he would not have traded a first-round pick for anyone by Monahan?
“I’m not going to just divulge our list, but would I have been as open to moving as high of a pick as I did if it wasn’t (Sean Monahan)? That’s probably a much more likely scenario that we wouldn’t have gone that deep for a pick in this situation,” Chevaldayoff said.
In other words, yes, that’s what that means.
Did the Canadiens know how badly the Jets wanted Monahan? Hard to say. Hughes did not give any indication that was the case, but whether it was the Jets or another team, it seems somewhat obvious Hughes used the Lindholm trade to his advantage here, and whether he simply got lucky that there was a team as desperate to add Monahan as the Jets were or he knew, the end result is the same: The Canadiens got another first-round pick via Sean Monahan, on top of the 2025 first-round pick they got for taking Monahan from the Flames to begin with.
And the urgency for the Canadiens seemed to be based on their experience last year, when Joel Edmundson was fighting to get back in the lineup in time to be a viable option at the deadline and Monahan was out with a torn groin. The fact the supply in the market shifted last year was also a warning sign for Hughes that he would be better off getting something done here while Monahan was the top centre available, at least to some teams, after the Lindholm trade went down.
“I think any time you go through this process, you try to understand the market, you try to understand who is or may be interested in the services of, in this case, Sean Monahan, what the upside would be and you measure that against the risk of any player (getting injured) — not specifically Sean Monahan, because I don’t have any specific (injury) concern in relation to Sean. If we did, we wouldn’t have signed him. We very comfortable it was a worthwhile risk to sign him,” Hughes said. “But there is a risk to any hockey player and there’s a risk to the market shifting too. You see that with who’s sellers, who’s buyers and how many other players end up on the market. I don’t think a (Mattias) Ekholm or a (Dmitry) Orlov, for example, were necessarily on the market in late January or early February last year.
“So we felt comfortable that this was the right deal and there wasn’t significant upside to waiting.”
Again, there’s some reading between the lines going on here, but Hughes seemed to suggest that extracting a first-round pick for Monahan, even if he did wait, wasn’t necessarily a given.
“With certain teams it’s really the cap that dictates everything and they don’t have enough space,” Hughes said. “But for many other teams, the fact that it’s a rental will lessen what they are willing to pay in terms of a return, 100 percent.
“There are teams who say they won’t give up a first-round pick for a rental.”
And in terms of his inability to add a prospect for Monahan?
“In terms of this trade it was more a pick that was available, and that was fine with us,” Hughes said.
He also added, “We asked for prospects in certain cases, but the prospects we asked for, the teams did not want to part with them.”
Doesn’t really sound like that hot of a market for Monahan, at least not right now, and at least not at that price point. Perhaps the market would have gotten hotter had Hughes waited, but when you get the price you have set on a player — and a first-round pick was clearly the targeted price — you grab it.
To get that price, you need a set of conditions to develop. The Lindholm trade and the Jets identifying Monahan as a great fit on their team and not really having any other options created those conditions.
“Sometimes when you’re doing things like this, you don’t know what the timeline is of the other team. That’s always kind of the tricky part,” Cheveldayoff said. “Everyone’s going to have a different timeline, everyone’s going to have a different pressure point. Fortunately for us, we were able to make a deal happen. Obviously, you give up a good asset, but you have to do that in this league to get a good player.”
So, from the sounds of that answer, it was the Canadiens that wanted to move quickly here. And in terms of the decision to part with a first-round pick, that also seemed to be related to the timeline the Canadiens had created.
“I think when you’re in situations like this, and I’ve been on both sides of them, you grind away to not have to trade it and you grind away to make sure you make the other team give it up,” Cheveldayoff said. “It can be a game of chicken. But you also have to weigh the alternatives and weigh the options and weigh the fit. When the fit is great, when you believe this is the best option for you, you have to make those tough calls.”
Were the Jets the only team willing to part with a first-round pick for Monahan? We’ll probably never know. But the old saying in hockey is all it takes is one team, and if the Jets were that one team, the Canadiens found them at just the right time.
But now, Hughes needs to look forward. There are still five weeks remaining before the March 8 trade deadline, and the fact Hughes was able to get a first-round pick without retaining money on Monahan is another significant development here because it means the Canadiens remain open for business.
They are still carrying three goalies and Jake Allen’s name has been out there for weeks. Having their one remaining retention slot could help facilitate a trade there, though it doesn’t sound as though there is that much of a market for his services at his cap number, or even at half price. If there were a robust market to acquire Allen, he probably would have been traded already, because our sense is the cost to get him wouldn’t necessarily be all that high.
A trade market can ebb and flow like the tides. Just look at the Edmonton Oilers, who seemed desperate to add a goaltender a month or two ago, but are no longer nearly that desperate, to say the least. Frederik Andersen is on the road to recovery in Carolina, meaning their need for goaltending may be on the wane. But all it takes is one injury to shift the market forces around.
If the Canadiens don’t use the retention slot to trade a player away, they could always use it to facilitate a trade and add another asset, like they did last season when they brokered the deal that sent Nick Bonino to the Pittsburgh Penguins by retaining half of his salary and got a fourth-round pick for the trouble.
But from a more big-picture standpoint, the Canadiens are also approaching a time when they will need to add actual bodies to their NHL lineup. Losing Monahan will hurt the Canadiens players currently in that room competing every night, and though every player will surely accept that this is what happens when you are in the position the Canadiens are in, it would not be far-fetched to imagine those same players wondering how long they will be in this position.
(Photo of Sean Monahan and Kyle Connor: Darcy Finley/NHLI via Getty Images)
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2024-02-03 04:01:48Z
CBMiVmh0dHBzOi8vdGhlYXRobGV0aWMuY29tLzUyNDgxNzAvMjAyNC8wMi8wMi9zZWFuLW1vbmFoYW4tdHJhZGUtZGVhZGxpbmUtY2FuYWRpZW5zLWpldHMv0gFcaHR0cHM6Ly90aGVhdGhsZXRpYy5jb20vNTI0ODE3MC8yMDI0LzAyLzAyL3NlYW4tbW9uYWhhbi10cmFkZS1kZWFkbGluZS1jYW5hZGllbnMtamV0cy8_YW1wPTE
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