NHL Trade Deadline Primer: Eight thoughts on the past week's moves

Checking in with some recent NHL Trades.

Apologies for taking a long time between updates here, but it has been a hectic week. So let us discuss some of the biggest moves that have happened around the NHL in that time.

J.T. Miller is finally a New York Ranger again. The Philadelphia Flyers maybe positioned themselves for a big offseason. I do not understand what the Dallas Stars did.

Let’s talk about all of it.

1. The more I watch the New York Rangers in operation, the more I become convinced nobody there has any idea what they are doing, why they have been successful and what they are still lacking to actually win a Stanley Cup.

I am not sure if this is simply a Chris Drury problem in the general manager’s office, or if this is something that goes above him. I suspect it might be the latter because the Rangers operated this way even before he became the GM. Either way, I still don’t think this organization truly gets it. The “ah, hell with it, we have a better goalie than you do and that’s good enough for us” mentality will only get you so far. They should know this by now.

The culture of that roster right now also just seems to be absolutely rancid.

I have never seen a single team have so many players take a blow torch to the coaching staff and organization the way so many on that roster have done this season. Nobody seems to like their role. Nobody seems to understand their role. Nobody seems to trust management. The vibes are just brutal.

I guess that is what happens when you spend the entire summer very publicly trying to jettison your captain (which, admittedly, was the right move) and then leak to the media that every veteran on the team could be traded at any moment.

But I look at the moves they have made in-season, following the relative inaction of the offseason, and I just can not fathom the direction here.

Failing to develop Kaapo Kakko and then trading him for Will Borgen, and then signing Borgen to a multi-year deal after seeing him play less than 20 games? I don’t get it. Even worse, I don’t think it’s going to work out long-term, even if Borgen has been better than expected so far. It’s still an insanely small sampling.

The Matt Rempe usage and situation is still insane to me. Why is he there? What does he do?

But then we have this week’s Miller trade. And brother, you will never believe it, but I do not understand this one, either.

The trade:

New York Rangers receive: J.T. Miller, Erik Brannstrom, Jackson Dorrington
Vancouver Canucks receive: Filip Chytil, Victor Mancini, 2025 conditional first-round pick

It is not that Miller is a bad player. He is objectively a very good player and was literally a 100-point scorer just a year ago. He is also a better player than Filip Chytil, who the Rangers traded to Vancouver (even if I like Chytil — and I do).

In that sense, he does make them better in the short-term.

But does he make them so much better in the short-term that it will fix the Rangers’ problems this season?

Does he turn them back into a Stanley Cup contender this season?

Or next season?

Or the season after?

And what does that mean from a big-picture outlook?

I just …. don’t see it. And one of the main reasons I don’t see it is that this is the exact type of trade the Rangers would have made back in the Glen Sather days. You know the type of move I am talking about. Trading a good, cheaper, younger player who is probably still playing the best hockey of their career for an older, more expensive player who has probably already played the best hockey of his career. That sort of roster construction failed, and it failed badly. I am not optimistic about it working out better here this time around.

In trading for Miller, the Rangers simply added another player on the wrong side of 30 with a long-term, big-money contract to a team that already has too many players on the wrong side of 30 with long-term, big-money contracts.

How long will he keep scoring at the rate he has in recent years? What will the Rangers do to continue fixing the rest of their issues? It’s not a cure-all move, but eats up a significant amount of salary cap space in the coming seasons.

Miller has been great in his first couple of games with the Rangers, but they still need a lot of work to get in the playoffs and still have to fix a lot of issues. Primarily on their defense.

The current playoff cutoff in the Eastern Conference is 92.3 points entering play on Wednesday evening. So let’s just say they need to reach 93 points to qualify. That is 39 points in 30 games. That would require a .650 points percentage the rest of the way. They’ve only played at a .518 pace through 52 games. It’s going to take a lot. Miller moves the needle, but it’s probably not as much as they need.

For the playoffs this season or the ultimate goal of winning a Stanley Cup. There are still major, major philosophical issues that need to be addressed there, and as long as Igor Shesterkin keeps putting everybody on his back I am not sure they are going to adequately address them. Because why would they? It is not like they have had any urgency prior to this to try and address them.

2. The Philadelphia Flyers continued their rebuild in a multi-player deal with the Calgary Flames.

The trade:

Flames receive: Joel Farabee, Morgan Frost
Flyers receive: Andrei Kuzmenko, Jakob Pelletier, 2025 second-round pick, 2028 seventh-round pick

My immediate reaction to this is simply: What do the Flyers have planned for this offseason?