NHL Trade Deadline Primer: Mikael Granlund

Beware of the leading scorer on the bad team.

The NHL Trade Deadline is on March 7, so it is time to start taking a look at some players that could be on the move and some bigger picture trade deadline subjects. Today we focus on San Jose Sharks forward Mikael Granlund, who is one of the most volatile trade deadline players — the leading scorer on the bad team.

Somebody has to get the points.

More specifically, somebody is going to get the points.

Every team in the NHL, whether it is a bad team, a good team, or something in between is going to score a certain number of goals over the course of a season. Along with that, every team is also going to have somebody that has to lead them in scoring.

Simply leading a team in scoring does not always mean much in terms of evaluating them as a player and the impact they could have on a different team. This is especially true when you are talking about bad teams without many impact players at the bottom of the standings.

I remember maybe 10-12 years ago when I was writing for CBS (in an article that has since been scrubbed from the Internet from what I can find) I did an interview with Chris Snow during his time with the Minnesota Wild when he was working as their analytics guru. We were discussing playing evaluation and the role that advanced metrics could play, and trying to find an appropriate way to measure a player’s contributions and value. One of the things he mentioned in that interview was a message that former Wild coach Jacques Lemaire used to have for the front office.

That message was the very first sentence up at the top — somebody has to get the points.

His argument was simple: Every bad team in the league has somebody that is going to get first-line ice-time, play 20-22 minutes per game, get power play time and those circumstances alone are going to put them in position to rack up point totals they might not have on another team.

It also tells you nothing of whether or not they are actually impactful.

I always chose to call it the Dick Tarnstrom impact.

Longtime Penguins fans will remember Tarnstrom as an early 2000s waiver claim that ended up leading the 2003-04 team in scoring and having a couple of career years with the team. He never came close to matching that production before or after. It wasn’t so much that the Penguins figured out how to get a lot out of him or turned him into a top-line player, he just happened to get the most playing time and the most favorable offensive spots on a team that did not have anybody else.

He was the guy that benefitted from getting big ice-time on a bad roster.

More recently, you had somebody like Max Domi in Chicago during the 2022-23 season, and even more recently Mikael Granlund with the San Jose Sharks.

Granlund is the player we are focussing on here because he figures to be a potential rental trade candidate over the next few weeks as the Sharks remain at the bottom of the NHL standings in the middle of an extended rebuild.

Let’s talk about it.