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NHL GMs: This year’s trade deadline’s ‘so different’

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The NHL trade deadline is less than two weeks away. Will we see be names like Jarome Iginla dealt, a flurry of trades in general, or are we in for a relatively uneventful deadline day?

It’s hard to say because we’ve never really been in a scenario like this before.

“We have a totally different year than we’ve ever had,” Hurricanes GM Jim Rutherford told the NHL.com. “We’re going to have more teams in the race, and so I would suspect that you’re going to pay a premium for players because so many teams are looking for them and these races are going to have a lot of teams in them right until the end.”

Boston Bruins GM Peter Chiarelli would agree with that assessment.

“It’s been so different because everyone is in it and everyone is looking to add,” Chiarelli said. “There are a few teams that aren’t looking to add, but I would say most of them are still in the race.”

When you mix a short season with how close teams are to each other in terms of overall skill thanks to the salary cap, you end up in a situation where almost every team feels like they still got a shot of making the playoffs. Just 10 points separates fourth and last place in the Western Conference.

At the same time, the gap could widen over the next two weeks. Additionally, there are reasons to believe there might be more action over the next two weeks than some would predict.

“It just seems this is the one year too that teams have that extra cap space,” Pittsburgh Penguins GM Ray Shero pointed out in an NHL.com interview. “Where a team like us in the last couple of years really didn’t have any cap space and maybe moving forward with the cap going down, we might not have that in the future.”

In fact, nearly every team has more than enough cap space available going into the deadline, based on capgeek’s numbers. Will that unique level of flexibility prove to be the difference? Or will nothing make up for how tight the standings have been?

We’ll find out soon.