There’s about 20 different narratives that one could manipulate the Vegas Florida Stanley cup finals into representing. Pierre LeBrun has spun it as “recycling coaches works actually”, which is not the direction I would have gone. The concept that interests me: Vegas and Florida both made big blockbuster trades recently. I mean big, blockbuster trades, the kind involving possibly HOF trajectory players. Vegas traded a large amount of picks and prospects for Jack Eichel, and Florida traded their top scorer of 2022 and their best defenseman for Matthew Tkachuk. We could talk about the relative value of these trades (Buffalo is probably rather happy with Alex Tuch and some lottery tickets and sees the trade as a win-win; Calgary has to be disappointed with the early returns on Huberdeau, but based on how mediocre Ekblad was without Weegar next to him this year, the final tally may be more nuanced), but that doesn’t interest me a whole lot. I’m compelled by the sheer fact that both teams made the big trade and then won a lot of hockey games.

This is the NHL. So many teams are scared of making major shake ups, so many teams are content to run back the same squads out of fear of the unknown. Both Vegas and Florida took the risk, and it worked out for both. This league is so light on serious blockbuster trades that you can go several years without seeing any. But it has actually been a notable pattern that taking the big swing can reap big rewards. The PK Subban for Shea Weber trade is maybe the closest recent comparison to the Huberdeau/Weegar for Tkachuk deal, a like for like swap of #1 Ds. Both Montreal and Nashville made their only finals series of the centuries after that deal – both teams saw what they liked in the other guy, and both were proven correct. The Eichel type package, where a genuine superstar gets traded for a haul of young players, also doesn’t have many recent comparables. It is so rare that a genuine superstar in his prime gets dealt. Ilya Kovalchuk comes to mind as one, all the way back in 2011. The Devils made the finals in 2012, the best playoff finish of that team’s era. I feel like Ryan O’Reilly is a step below the Eichel or Tkachuk or Kovalchuk tier, not quite a true HOF potential superstar, but if you count him, you’d have to count that as another success for taking gambles – he won the Conn Smythe in his first St. Louis year. The other truly elite players to get traded in the last decade: Mark Stone (a support of this thesis), Taylor Hall and Erik Karlsson (solid counterpoints – San Jose found out the hard way that matching up two offense only D-men sounds better on paper than on ice, and Hall did find another level to his game in N.J. but the team around him was never good enough for it to matter).

Depth matters in this sport, but it’s possible that how much it matters has been overstated. If you look at most Cup winning or Cup losing or Presidents Trophy winning teams, most of them are as good as their top 5-6 players. Tampa and Colorado’s recent championships and this year’s Bruins and the Chicago dynasty had nice depth, but every single one of those teams also had several truly elite players, a collection of high end talent that towered over competitors. The egalitarian approach to team building usually only gets you so far. Carolina, a deep team with at most 3 elite players (Aho, Svechnikov, Slavin – some people might push back and say only Aho is elite), has ran back the same core with new accessory pieces for 5 playoff runs now. They’ve plateaued at round 3. Minnesota seems the most likely victim to join the party. They haven’t won a playoff series in the Kirill Kaprizov era, mostly because Kirill Kaprizov is the only member of the Wild to even vaguely get his name in the top 30 or maybe even top 50 conversation. Both of these teams, and several others, could use a blockbuster trade. You hope they have the courage to make one.