Weird NHL Trade Deadline Ideas From LTIR Roster Dumps to Coach Changes and More: DGB Mailbag

We have one week left and then we can all stop writing about the same thing over and over again and sit back and enjoy trade deadline day. While we wait, let’s open the mail bag and see what nonsense you’ve come up with this month.

Note: Submitted questions have been edited for clarity and style.

Faced with Coyotes legend Shea Weber, which team has the better overall roster, Team Midseason Dead Space or Team Summer Dead Space? Team Midseason Dead Space is any space traded from opening night through the close of trading, while Team Summer Dead Space is from any award of the Stanley Cup until the final rosters are due.

I doubt you’d get a full 20 players for each side, but I bet you could definitely get a shiny game put together. And seeing that they’re all LTIR types anyway, it’s probably for the better. – Jacob B.

Sounds like fun, although I suspect Team Summer will win this one. let’s find out

We’re looking for players who have been traded and counted against a team’s cap but have never played a game for them or anyone else. You get credit for the player’s climax, not their broken-down final version. And in the case of people who have been LTIR traded more than once, the most recent counts.

Here’s what I came up with:

Team Summer LTIR Trade

Team Midseason LTIR Trade

OK, that’s closer than I thought, thanks to some older trades I forgot. One could argue that Team Midseason has the edge in goal and Kesler gives them a nice mix up front. But the Hossa/Datsyuk/Pronger combo is just too much and Team Summer will take this one. (At least until Carey Price’s contract trades tomorrow.)

Each team may trade with itself from a previous season within the last 30 years. The trade cannot be for someone still in the current roster (the Sharks cannot trade Vlasic for 2013-14, for example) and is a direct deal for the role outside of the current team (92-93 Gilmour cost the Leafs Auston Matthews , Mario costs Pittsburgh Crosby, etc.). The trade only applies to the remainder of this season and the playoffs.

Some decisions are pretty obvious (Sabres needs a year of Prime Hasek), while others are good debate (do the Avs go from their glory years with 2C Forsberg or 1G Roy to join the current team?) and some infuriate because they remember that this is the only way the Bruins could get better this season. — William N.

The first thing I realized when reading this question was that this is the last time the 1992-93 season will be “the last 30 years” and that caused me to sit alone in a dark room for 12 hours. Thanks for that William, I hope you step on a Lego made of smaller, pointier Legos.

But yes, the goalkeepers will be the key here. My first thought was the Leafs, who could upgrade significantly with anyone from Curtis Joseph, Eddie Belfour or Felix Potvin. But I think you get an even bigger boost in New Jersey, where Vitek Vanecek was good, but a guy named Martin Brodeur would be better. And Vegas would probably take Marc-Andre Fleury from a couple of years ago as a new starter.

Other big upgrades: the Penguins bring in Jaromir Jagr as their top RW, the Oilers trade Darnell Nurse for Chris Pronger as their top defenseman, and the Kings bring back Luc Robitaille as their go-to LW. The Bruins could do better too as we could claim Tim Thomas or Tuukka Rask as a backup goalie. The Predators would probably be better with Prime Ryan Suter on their second pair, Jarome Iginla could return to Calgary as a top RW, and I think a rookie Teemu Selanne would be an upgrade over today’s Blake Wheeler for the Jets. (Anyone wanting to argue that Teemu would be a Coyote based on franchise parentage might find this useful.)

Let’s also get Rod Brind’Amour as the Hurricanes’ number two center, just so his coach has someone to train with.

Since it looks like NHL players are done choosing their birth year as their jersey number, can you give us the best list of players who have done so? The #1 guy is pretty obvious but curious to see how the rest of the team fares. — Scott A

First of all, no you can’t make a full squad because I’m pretty sure there aren’t any goalkeepers and you wouldn’t get six defenders. For some reason, year of birth equals jersey number has always been a thing for forwards.

But we can rank even if there isn’t much excitement at the top. You have to admire Sidney Crosby’s loyalty to the 87 — anyone can wear their favorite number on a jersey, but he’s spent millions of dollars just to have her in his contract for 17 straight years. Strange? Absolutely, but that’s what we call commitment down to the smallest detail.

Crosby and Connor McDavid take our top two spots. From there it gets harder. Patrick Kane is our only option at 88 as none of Eric Lindros, David Pastrnak, Andrei Vasilevskiy or Brent Burns were born that year.

You’d think the number 91 would be fertile ground here, but it’s actually not as strong as you might think. Steven Stamkos and John Tavares were both born in 1990 while Tyler Seguin was born in 1992. Ryan O’Reilly, on the other hand, was born in 1991 but wears 90. That bothers me more than it should, and leaves us with Vladimir Tarasenko as our best bet.

To round out the top five, I’m going with Mikko Rantanen at 96, which means I don’t have to choose between Gabriel Landeskog and Evgeny Kuznetsov at 92. Honorable mentions go to Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Mika Zibanejad at 93 plus André Burakowski at 95.

I want to mediate a trade between players and goalkeepers. The players have to go back to using wooden sticks and in return the goalkeepers have to go back to the equipment from 1990.

Players can’t shoot as hard, so goaltenders no longer need the massive gear they assure us composite sticks made necessary. And players are stripped of their sophisticated weapons, but they also have a lot more nets to shoot at. I am putting this trade on the table for the consideration of the players and goalkeepers, but also the league and the fans. Do any of these constituencies agree to the trade? It seems win-win-win-win to me. —Salvador O.

Count me in. That would be a clear win for the fans because it would ultimately increase the score. From there, however, it would be a difficult sale.

In theory, anything that’s good for the fans is also a win for the league. But to do that, the NHL would have to recognize that it’s in the entertainment business, and that’s always a stretch. I’d bet the skaters would complain, at least initially, because most of them have never played without a stick that bends like a preschooler’s ruler. Maybe they’ll come around eventually, but it would take some convincing.

And of course the goalkeepers would never stop complaining about it because goalkeepers are the worst people on earth. They can’t move the posts half an inch without the goalie union crying over muscle memory, so taking away their inflatable sumo suits would be an absolute no-no. They would probably go out en masse. Which, when I think about it, is another plus.

With the Broncos trading in the NFL for head coach Sean Payton, what potential NHL playoff team would be looking for a playoff push coach (if such a thing were common)? – Tim G

It’s a strange year to be contemplating a managerial change as Barry Defiance is still lying in wait and half the bad teams have guys who will very obviously fire them three seconds into the season but stick around for tanking purposes. Do any of the non-playoff teams have coaches that anyone would like to trade with? Maybe John Tortorella, and someone would probably tell themselves Craig Berube, but I’m not sure the line would be too long.

The only wild card would be if the Flames dropped out and made Darryl Sutter available. This is a guy known for short-term magic, including a mid-season cup win with the Kings. If you’re the Panthers, how many Ben Chiarots would this upgrade be worth?

Let’s say your team has the fifth best chance of picking up Connor Bedard. Expect a call from St. Louis for all three first-round picks?

It would give a team like Arizona or Vancouver additional first rounds and give St. Louis a greater chance of making the top 4. Sharp? Yes, please. — @Marsupial129

It’s definitely spicy. Would you do it if you were the team trading down? As of this writing, the Blues sit 24th in percentage terms, meaning they would have the ninth best odds. That’s a 5 percent chance, which isn’t far from the 8.5 percent chance that the fifth worst team has. In theory, dropping two late-round firsts by a few percent seems like decent value. Assuming the Blues pick isn’t lottery protected, it might make sense.

That means we know it wouldn’t happen. Remember the DGB’s First Law of NHL Transactions: Every GM’s top priority is their own job security and reputation, not the long-term success of their team. Selling off the lottery listing might make sense if the price is right, but no GM would have the guts to do it. They would know that if it went back, and they eventually traded away the Connor Bedard pick, they would never hear the end of it. No way they’d take the risk, even though it would make sense for a team.

Instead of trading an entire first round pick, teams should be able to move some of their winning lottery combinations. Let’s say, to make a deal work, Team A wants a late-round pick, but Team B doesn’t have it or wants to give it up. Team B should be able to offer Team A either a certain number of combinations or a fraction. Would a really bad team send a prospect to a team leaving a rebuild to increase their chance of a big draft? – Elliot G.

Love creativity again. And theoretically, this one could actually work on one condition: GMs would insist that we never know what the odds turned out to be. In other words, a GM might be willing to trade half of their lottery odds to another team, but only if the winning lottery combination can never be traced back to them. We wouldn’t know if the winning team got lucky with their own numbers or someone else’s. And honestly, what’s the fun in that for the rest of us? Great idea, but it just wouldn’t work.

Connor Bedard. (Dennis Pajot/Getty Images)

If teams could trade dead money like buyouts or cap-recapture, what would be the unintended consequences? We all know the NHL would consider this now that Luongo’s is done. —Paul L

I’m including this one mainly because I admire how Canucks fans still hold on to their bitterness over the Luongo thing. And they’re absolutely right, by the way. I still can’t believe the league screwed them – and only them – like that.

That said, dead money trading seems like a bad idea, right? We’re kind of seeing it thanks to these LTIR trades. One could argue that this would just be the logical extension of that concept, and it would be more intellectually honest than letting teams pretend they still believe that Shea Weber might one day pass an investigation.

Do we really want the Coyotes, or whoever capable of simply loading up dead money, artificially bottoming, while also relieving other teams of their cap mistakes? Should a big market contender be able to buy up their worst deals and pass that fee along with a draft pick or two to a rebuild team before going straight back to the market to sign another star?

(Wait, I think I’m telling myself this…check back in a few weeks.)

I read your article on increasing deadline-day blockbusters and have a suggestion of my own.

The trade deadline consists almost entirely of good teams getting good players on expiring contracts from bad teams in exchange for tips, prospects, and bloated contracts to make the salary cap work. Let’s get into the rental situation by allowing players on multi-year contracts to be traded almost like loans in football for just the rest of the season. At the end of the season, the traded player goes back to their original team.

It’s a bit of an extreme idea, I’m not sure players would go for it, and it will make the tanking issue much worse, but if our goal is to reduce the trade deadline, this is the suggestion. Imagine the excitement of which team would have been able to trade for McDavid when the Oilers were bottom of the table. — Jacob M.

I really love bringing my craziest ideas out into the world and then hearing from people who want to go further. James, that’s a terrible idea that would never work. So yes, let’s definitely consider it.

Pros: The busiest deadlines imaginable. No more long-term rebuilds because bad teams would have four first-round picks to work with each year. No more great young players in places like Ottawa or Buffalo who have never played a significant game in their careers. Takes the NBA concept of super teams to a logical extreme and beyond.

Cons: Absolutely no continuity in building a contender. Would take the whole “rummaging for laundry” thing to the extreme. It would be super depressing to play for the Avalanche for three months and then realize you have to be a Coyote again. Everyone’s hockey reference sites would be even messier than they already are. Patrick Kane couldn’t decide to take a trade for 10 years.

Both pros and cons: James Duthie smokes his way through reporting trade deadlines and visibly ages 14 years in eight hours.

(Top Photo by Shea Weber: Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images)