The NHL Trade Deadline Has Made a Comeback in Recent Years
More productive players were on the move in the past few seasons. Will that trend continue in 2025?
This time last year, I wrote that the NHL trade deadline was probably a bit overhyped, relative to how much we fixate on it as fans or media members. (Apologies in advance to those looking to get amped up for Friday’s 3pm ET cut-off for deals.)
For example, when I looked at how well a team’s net talent acquired at the deadline correlates to its change in Elo rating over the rest of the regular season, the relationship was fairly weak (explaining about 6 percent of the variation). And in the same research, I found that a team’s pre-deadline quality was about 15.5 times as important as the amount of talent it added at the deadline in terms of predicting its eventual performance in the playoffs.
But I also noted that the importance of the deadline seemed to be increasing in the salary cap era of NHL history:
“However, if you’re looking for meaning in today’s moves, I do have some good news. In the same data, the deadline does appear to be gaining relative importance during the salary cap era. Since 2005-06, a team’s pre-deadline Elo is only 7.4 times as important as its deadline GAR added in terms of predicting playoff wins. That still means it’s tough to say whether a great deadline will manifest in a Stanley Cup run or not — but it seems to be more likely now than it was before the salary cap came into play.”
This note jumped out to me when I was messing around with a list of the best deadline pickups by Goals Above Replacement (GAR) since 1980 — as defined by players who were acquired within 40 days of deadline day:
Aside from marveling at the sheer absurdity of Craig Anderson’s performance after being traded by the Colorado Avalanche to the Ottawa Senators at the 2011 deadline — he started 18 of Ottawa’s last 24 games, racking up 14.6 GAR by posting a league-best .939 SV% and 13.7 goals saved above average — it struck me that we are coming out of a spell in the late 2010s where the best post-deadline performers generally made less of an impact than they did earlier in the decade or in the late 2000s.
Right before the 2005 lockout, and especially in the decade that followed it, we saw many trade deadlines yield pickups who went on to create a lot of value for their new teams — yes, Anderson dwarfs any other on the list, but the 2004, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011 and 2015 deadlines all contained at least four players who tacked on 4.0 or more GAR in a short period of time for their new teams.
That volume of high-impact trade targets slowed down some in the back half of the 2010s. The 2018 deadline didn’t feature a single player who generated 4+ GAR after being traded, nor did 2020 — although that one has some extenuating circumstances. (For that reason, I excluded it from the chart/rolling average below.)
But the past few years have featured a return of sorts to the type of post-deadline impact we got used to in the years immediately after the lockout. It started with D-men Mattias Ekholm and Dmitry Orlov (whom I somewhat embarrassingly called “totally unnecessary” for that year’s stacked Bruins team) producing excellent numbers with their new clubs in 2022-23, then led to Jake Guentzel having one of the best post-deadline runs in recent memory after switching from Pittsburgh to Carolina. Add on solid performances from Sean Monahan and Andrei Kuzmenko in their new destinations, and the deadline was back in terms of giving us high-impact trade targets.
And this year could potentially do the same, depending on who gets moved. If Mikko Rantanen gets dealt again, for instance, he would easily be on pace to join the 4+ GAR club on the other side for his third team of the 2024-25 season. Others, such as Utah G Karel Vejmelka, Buffalo RW Alex Tuch, Pittsburgh winger Rickard Rakell and Anaheim G John Gibson, would be good candidates to do the same, as would Brad Marchand if there’s a universe where Boston actually trades him. Throw in the possibility that a totally random player goes off,1 and we ought to at least match last year’s crop of post-deadline producers.
No, moves swung at the trade deadline are still not necessarily a surefire predictor of success in the playoffs, or the rest of the regular season. But as a source of genuine, high-impact player movement, the deadline is starting to get its swag back, one deal at a time.
Filed under: NHL
Check out Anderson’s 2011 numbers in Colorado before that trade, and tell me anybody thought he would have the hottest post-trade run of anyone in 45 years, even after accounting for his solid track record before that season.