NHL Trade Deadline Primer: The four types of players that will ruin the good thing you have going

Avoid these types of players over the next few weeks.

The NHL Trade Deadline (March 6) is approaching, and until it arrives we are going to take a look at some of the significant players and teams that could be making moves. We continue today with the four types of trade deadline acquisitions you need to avoid. Approach these trades with caution.

We have already seen some significant NHL trades happen over the past few weeks, and while the actual trade action never matches the hype, speculation or rumors, you can be sure a few more are going to be made over the next two weeks.

Some of those trades will be good, and they will look good from the moment they happen.

If somebody gets Robert Thomas away from the St. Louis Blues, that is going to be a good move.

Vincent Trocheck would not have been my choice for an Olympic team, but he is a good NHL player and will help somebody as a second-or third-line center.

There are good and useful players to be had.

There are also players that will be risky moves that might not pan out, and many of them will also be obvious from the start.

Let’s talk about some of them. Not necessarily the specific players to avoid, but the type of player to avoid.

The “somebody has to get the points” guy

The exact date or season escapes me, and I believe the article itself has been lost to the internet void, but during one of my tenures with CBS Sports I did a couple of interviews with Chris Snow (rip) when he was doing data analysis and statistical analysis for the Minnesota Wild. During one of those discussions we were talking about player evaluation and how misleading traditional box score numbers (goals, assists, points) can be in certain situations.

He referenced a saying that former Wild coach Jacques Lemaire had regarding players on bad teams.

The saying: “Somebody has to get the points.”

The thought process behind it was actually very simple, and something that should have been painfully obvious, yet still seemed like a mind-blowing philosophy to me at the time. Every NHL team, good or bad, is going to score X number of goals in a season. Nobody gets shut out every game. Even bad teams are going to have leading scorers that put up respectable or top-line numbers. It does not necessarily mean they are top-line players, and you should approach them with some caution when thinking about trading for them, or signing them, and giving them a role on a new team.

Somebody has to play on the top line.

Somebody has to play the most minutes.

Somebody has to get the top power play time.

Somebody has to play in the favorable offensive situations.

Somebody has to lead the team.

All of that adds up into production that might be masking underlying issues that exist with the player, or over-inflates their actual value.

Hockey history is full of these guys. Call it the Dick Tarnstrom effect if you want.

Of course, that does not mean EVERY top scorer on a bad team fits in this category, but it is supposed to apply to the non-star-level players. Connor Bedard of the Chicago Blackhawks, for example, is a leading scorer on a bad team that would fit as a top-line player anywhere in the NHL because he is a legitimate superstar.

But Mikael Backlund being the second-leading scorer on the Calgary Flames does not really mean much when it comes to his offensive upside or what sort of role he could play on a new team.

We have seen some of these guys get traded in the past.

The Dallas Stars traded a first-round pick for Mikael Granlund after the San Jose Sharks put him into one of those “somebody has to get the points” situations for a season-and-a-half. His production in a smaller role with both Dallas and now Anaheim has not kept up with what he was doing in San Jose, and without that production there really is not a lot of value to his game. He was a “somebody has to get the points” guy.

Back in the 2009-10 season the Penguins traded for Alexei Ponikarovsky, who was one of the top-scorers with the Toronto Maple Leafs for a few years, and got almost no return on that investment. He, too, was a “somebody has to get the points” guy.

Martin Erat spent the early parts of the 2010s on some mediocre Nashville Predators teams as one of their top-scorers, resulting in the Washington Capitals trading top prospect Filip Forsberg for him. Erat was a total flop in Washington while Forsberg became an All-Star level player in Nashville. Erat was a “somebody has to get the points” guy.

When Vegas traded first, second and third-round picks for Tomas Tatar at the 2017-18 NHL Trade Deadline he was bordering on a “somebody has to get the points” guy with a Detroit Red Wings team that was starting to go through its rebuild at the end of the Ken Holland era. He was a flop in Vegas, then went to Montreal where he again become something of a “somebody has to get the points” guy.

When going through the potential NHL trade deadline sellers and available players this year there are not many of these players floating around, but one of the most concerning examples of it has actually already been traded, and it is forward Kiefer Sherwood going from the Vancouver Canucks to the San Jose Sharks.

Sherwood was not the Canucks’ leading point-getter, but he does lead the team with 17 goals in only 44 games (four more goals than anybody on the roster) and is in the middle of a career year offensively. It is also a season in which he has seen the most ice-time of his career, received significant power play time and is scoring goals on the highest shooting percentage of his career.

The Sharks gave up two second-round picks for him.

It is not an outrageous overpay or the sort of thing that is going to come back to haunt them, but there is a question of opportunity cost and if there was something else they could have acquired with those picks. It is going to be interesting to see how Sherwood performs down the stretch.

He is a player whose situation would have raised some red flags for me.

The face-off guy

Former Buffalo Sabres and Nashville Predators center Paul Gaustad is one of the best face-off players in recent NHL history. The dude was as close to automatic as you could get at the dot and was a true master at his craft.

There was a game in the early 2010s when the Predators were playing in Pittsburgh, shortly after he was acquired in a trade, that Gaustad did not play in.

The Predators scratches were sitting next to me in the press box that night and Gaustad had the seat immediately to my right. Like most scratches sitting up there, he said nothing for most of the night, snacked on cups of popcorn and just had a laser focus on the ice. That changed at one random moment when one of his teammates, I believe it was his replacement for the night, won an otherwise meaningless face-off in the middle of the game, resulting in Gaustad pumping his fist, smacking the counter with both hands, and emphatically yelling “FUCKING RIGHT. GREAT JOB. THAT’S AWESOME” to nobody in particular. None of his fellow scratches reacted or acknowledged it. But my man was FIRED UP.

Maybe it was the technique that was used. Maybe it was an area his teammate was working to improve and everything clicked for him in that moment. Maybe face-offs are the equivalent of porn to Paul Gaustad. I honestly have no idea. But it stuck with me.

I bring this up to point out how much hockey people love face-offs. They LOVE THEM. They are obsessed with them. The NHL’s board of governors love nothing more than thinking of new ways every offseason on how they can tweak face-offs and the face-off process. General managers and head coaches value them. Broadcasts will make them seem like the most important thing that has ever existed in the sport of hockey, almost as if they count the same as actual goals.

The thing about them is that while they do matter, their importance is also sometimes greatly overstated.

They matter in the micro. Not the macro.

When you have a defensive zone draw in the closing seconds of a one-goal game, that face-off matters.

But losing it is not a total failure. It does not mean the play is going to automatically result in a goal. What you do AFTER the face-off sometimes matters just as much as the face-off itself, and perhaps even more.

The top-four teams in the NHL this season in face-off win percentage are the Toronto Maple Leafs, Ottawa Senators, New York Rangers and Edmonton Oilers. Only one of those teams is currently in a playoff position. Two of those teams absolutely stink.

The bottom-four teams in the NHL in face-off winning percentage are the Buffalo Sabres, Minnesota Wild, Chicago Blackhawks and Tampa Bay Lightning. Three of those teams are playoff teams. Two of them are among the best teams in hockey.

It is an important aspect of the game. But it is not THAT important.

Sometimes at this time of year teams can overpay for it. You do not want to overpay for it.

Let’s talk a little more about that, and the other two types of players that should be avoided over the next couple of weeks.