The NHL trade deadline (March 3) is still more than three weeks away. But big deals are already happening, with the New York Islanders trading for Bo Horvat and the New York Rangers bringing in Vladimir Tarasenko.
We’re breaking down and grading all of the biggest moves from now through the deadline.
Rangers acquired forward Tarasenko and defenseman Niko Mikkola from the St. Louis Blues in exchange for a conditional first-round pick in the 2023 draft, a conditional fourth-round pick in the 2024 draft, forward Sammy Blais and defenseman Hunter Skinner.
In the end, it wasn’t Patrick Kane who slides across from Artemi Panarin and Mika Zibanejad on the Rangers’ top line. Instead, it might be someone who can help them even more in their pursuit of the Stanley Cup this season.
Tarasenko’s journey out of St. Louis was an unpredictable one. He won the Stanley Cup with the Blues in 2018-19, scoring 17 points in 26 games. But he asked for a trade in the summer of 2021, citing his displeasure with how the team handled multiple surgeries on his shoulder and a lack of trust in team management because of it.
Because of those injuries — Tarasenko played just 34 regular-season games from 2019 to ’21 — his trade value was low and the Blues held on to him. Then came the Tarasenko-ssance in 2021-22: 34 goals and 48 assists for 82 points in 75 games.
His value was high, but the Blues held on to him again. They expected to be a playoff team. They needed all the veteran scoring they could muster after David Perron left for Detroit as a free agent.
This season was a regression, not only for the Blues but for Tarasenko. He has 29 points in 38 games, including 10 goals, skating to a minus-18. He’s still a strong top-six winger despite that fall in 5-on-5 production, especially when it comes to shot generation and the ability to create shots off the rush. A change in scenery and linemates, and maybe those numbers trend up.
I had previously heard Tarasenko was open to waiving his no-trade clause for the Rangers, so that this trade happened now isn’t surprising. It’s a good fit.
New York has some natural playmakers in Panarin and Adam Fox who are going to benefit with having someone like Tarasenko who can shoot the puck from anywhere (and will). They’ve basically had a seat open at right wing in their top six the entirety of the season that Tarasenko fills.
Why didn’t Patrick Kane fill that hole? That might have been the most asked question Thursday when this trade was completed. Kane to the Rangers was one of those transactions that felt like it was being conjured into existence by fans and the punditry. The Chicago Blackhawks star is in the last year of his contract for a rebuilding team; the Rangers needed a right wing; and a trade to New York would mean a reunion with Panarin, who blossomed into a star playing with Kane in Chicago.
If not Kane, there was speculation that the Rangers could end up with Timo Meier of the San Jose Sharks, a pending restricted free agent who is younger (26) than Kane or Tarasenko and has scored 30 goals in 52 games for the Sharks this season.
The sense I get is that the cost for Kane and Meier was too high for the Rangers, both in what they’d have to give up and in cap implications. Tarasenko’s cap hit was $3.75 million after the Blues retention. Half of Kane’s cap hit would have been $5.25 million. Meier’s would have been $6 million, but the package the Rangers would have had to give up for him would have gotten much heavier if the Sharks also gobbled up part of his salary.
The Tarasenko deal gives the Rangers a top-six wing and more flexibility to do other things before the trade deadline. The Rangers gave up less for Vladimir Tarasenko than they did for Andrew Copp last season.
Well done, GM Chris Drury.
Look, Kane on the Rangers would have been intriguing, especially in a reunion with Panarin. But whatever injury that has nagged him this season is a concern, hurting his offensive production and making him basically a non-playable character on defense. Tarasenko’s offensive decline probably has more to do with the Blues’ descent into deadline seller than it does his own inefficiencies.
Mikkola, meanwhile, is a depth acquisition. He’s a defensive defenseman who has played at a replacement level in 50 games this season, averaging 16:39 minutes per game. But replacement level would be an improvement for the Rangers’ third pairing, as Ben Harpur and Braden Schneider have gotten absolutely cratered at 5-on-5 (38.9% expected goals). Mikkola slides in for Harpur.
There’s a lot to like about both fits for the Rangers, from the lineup to the salary cap to the expiring contracts. But especially because of the cost of doing this business.
GM Doug Armstrong has never been one for delusions of grandeur when it comes to his roster. If he senses the Blues aren’t good enough for playoff qualification, he starts burning up the phones to ship players out. St. Louis has a 3% chance of making the playoffs, according to MoneyPuck.
Hence, Vladimir Tarasenko is now a Ranger.
He wasn’t going to be a St. Louis Blue after this season anyway. It’s hard to believe Armstrong had the appetite to give term to a 31-year-old winger, especially considering the contentious history between Tarasenko and the franchise.
The Blues wanted a first-rounder and a prospect for Tarasenko. But they were trying to work a deal for a pending free agent with full trade protection. The market wasn’t going to be robust.
The Rangers’ offer checked the Blues’ boxes, perhaps as best they could be checked.
The conditional first-rounder will be the lower of the Rangers or the Dallas Stars, which the Rangers acquired in the Nils Lundkvist trade. Keep in mind that the Dallas pick is a conditional conditional: If the pick is a top 10 selection, then it’ll transfer over to 2024 as an unprotected first-round pick. The Stars are currently four points ahead of the Rangers in the league-wide standings and have a 98.4% chance of making the playoffs.
The Blues get a 2024 fourth-round pick that becomes a third-round pick if the Rangers make the playoffs. That feels like the “tax” for salary retention. St. Louis fans will note that Armstrong gave up a 2023 second-round pick for the Detroit Red Wings to retain 50% of pending UFA defenseman Nick Leddy’s salary last trade deadline. So that won’t sit well with them.
Sammy Blais is a popular former Blues forward whose inclusion in the deal is a roster slot swap with Mikkola — both are pending UFAs. He’ll throw a check. People will cheer. The Blues reacquiring Blais brings the Pavel Buchnevich trade full circle, as the Rangers traded the talented winger to St. Louis out of financial concerns for Blais and a second-rounder in 2021. Unfortunately, the Blues are done in their season series against the Calgary Flames, so no Sammy Blais reunion with Milan Lucic.
Which brings us to the impeccably named Hunter Skinner.
The Blues weren’t getting any young player off the Rangers’ current roster. They weren’t getting one of the team’s top prospects like forward Brennan Othmann, defenseman Zac Jones or winger Will Cuylle. Instead they received a 21-year-old defenseman taken No. 112 overall by the Rangers in 2019 who has played for the Jacksonville Icemen of the ECHL and the AHL Hartford Wolfpack.
Is he a prospect? Yes, he is, although not even among the Rangers’ top three young defensemen. New York’s blueline is stacked, so they’re dealing from a position of strength. Maybe the Blues see something here that we don’t, because this part of the trade is the most disappointing. He’s a project that’s shown some improvement but needs much more of it on the defensive side of the ice. As this point, his ceiling feels like the AHL. That’s not great.
But again, Armstrong was not dealing from a position of strength. Tarasenko had trade protection. As it turns out, Ryan O’Reilly and Ivan Barbashev do not. The Blues could just be getting started for the trade deadline. Buckle up …
The rumor and speculation is now over regarding Vancouver Canucks center Bo Horvat. The New York Islanders have traded forwards Anthony Beauvillier and Aatu Raty, along with a conditional first-round pick in the 2023 draft (top-12 protected), in exchange for Vancouver’s now-former captain. The Canucks are retaining 25% of Horvat’s salary.
In 49 games played this season, Horvat already has tied a career high in goals with 31. He also was named to the Pacific Division roster for the 2023 NHL All-Star Game this past weekend. His contract expires at the end of this season, at which point he’ll hit unrestricted free agency.
How did both GMs do in this swap? Here are our grades:
Isles general manager Lou Lamoriello likes to keep things quiet. Remember when we heard about the Canucks and Islanders talking about J.T. Miller at the draft last summer? And how the Islanders opted not to do business with Vancouver partially because we had heard about those talks?
Suffice it to say, the Horvat trade happened with nary a peep about the Islanders and Canucks being in conversation. Just the way Lou likes it.
Lamoriello has never shied away from making a significant deal, no matter if his team is challenging for the Stanley Cup or desperately trying to bounce over the playoff bubble, like these Islanders. The significance of this deal isn’t just for the second half of the season but potentially for years to come.
“You have to give something to get something,” Lamoriello said Monday. “But with the depth we have down the middle, we felt this was something that helped our hockey team. Today and tomorrow. This is a 27-year-old player.”
In the short term, Horvat immediately bolsters an offense that ranks 25th in the NHL at 2.85 goals per game. He has 31 goals in 49 games, after scoring 31 goals in 70 games last season. He has 24 power-play goals over the past two seasons, which could be a boon to an Islanders unit that ranks 31st in the NHL in power-play conversion rate (15.5%). He wins 56% of his faceoffs, which will help New York as a middle-of-the-pack faceoff team (15th overall).
He is many things that the current Islanders are not.
But the reason the Islanders gave up what they did to make this move is, in theory, for the seasons beyond this one. Horvat told reporters that there have been no contract extension talks with the Islanders, saying, “We’ll see if we can get something done.”
Lamoriello made it no secret that this was a trade made to keep Horvat with the Islanders after this season.
“Whenever you make a transaction like this, you make it for a player that has character,” he said. “That knows what a team gives up. And certainly feels comfortable in the organization he’s in. All of that, he’ll recognize quickly, and hopefully we’ll get that done.”
Bringing Horvat back on a long-term deal is the whole ballgame here. The Islanders signed Mathew Barzal to an extension through 2030-31. He needs another elite forward to play with, either as a linemate or on the power play or as an anchor for another scoring line. The Islanders believe Horvat is that guy, and they appear willing to pay him the average annual salary that’ll fall between Anders Lee‘s $7 million in average annual value and Barzal’s $9.15 million in AAV.
It’s possible Horvat decides to test the free-agent waters. Heck, it’s possible Lamoriello understands that, sees the Islanders as something less than a playoff team and cuts his losses with a Horvat reflip ahead of the March 3 deadline to another contender. It’s Lou. Everything’s on the table.
(The 25% salary retention could come in really handy if there was a second Horvat trade, as the Isles could pick up another 25% of his salary to swing the doors open to a number of capped-out contenders looking to make a deal.)
But let’s be real: Lamoriello has been doing this for a long, long time — like, since the late 1980s. He is a big trade guy but not a gambler. He is making this trade with some confidence that Horvat is playing next to Belmont Park for the next several seasons or he isn’t making it.
Barzal, Horvat, Lee, Brock Nelson, Ryan Pulock, Adam Pelech, Noah Dobson and, hopefully, Ilya Sorokin (who is an unrestricted free agent in 2024): That’s a good, but not great, core to build around.
It’s possible that in Horvat and Barzal, the Islanders have two outstanding supporting players in search of a star to orbit around. It’s possible that Horvat is peaking and that an eight-year extension’s cap hit will look mighty different within five years. Adding another player 28 years or older (Horvat’s 28th birthday is April 5) to this roster doesn’t seem ideal.
As for the return to Vancouver, it was time for the Isles to stop waiting on Beauvillier. Raty has been projected by some to be a third-line center; and besides, Barzal and Horvat would have two center spots locked down if the latter re-signs. The hardest thing to surrender was the draft pick, although the Islanders do have some control over when the Canucks receive it. It’s top-12 lottery protected, but if it ends up being No. 12 overall in 2023, the Islanders could send it over now rather than risk a higher pick in 2024.
Lamoriello, of course, probably doesn’t see the Islanders as a lottery team this season or next. He clearly still believes that the Islanders are the team that went to the Eastern Conference finals twice in pandemic-impacted seasons, rather than the one that had a .512 points percentage last season and a .529 points percentage this season. And he believes, rightly or wrongly, that Bo Horvat is someone who can help the Islanders confirm his intuition.
If nothing else, this closes an odd loop in Lamoriello’s trade history. On June 30, 2013, the New Jersey Devils acquired goalie Cory Schneider from the Canucks for the ninth overall pick in the draft. That pick ended up being Horvat, who is now with the same franchise that still employs Schneider. Lou always gets his man, eventually.
The inkling that the Canucks were going to soon be out of the Bo Horvat business came a few weeks ago. President of hockey operations Jim Rutherford talked about how his team had a contract offer tabled for the captain since last summer but that the math on the net contract had significantly changed thanks to Horvat’s (conveniently timed) career-high goal-scoring season. Even if they wanted to up their ante for Horvat, the franchise’s decision to hand out new deals to forwards J.T. Miller and Brock Boeser made that economically unfeasible.
Horvat was a pending unrestricted free agent, and his team wasn’t going to bring him back — and the rest of the NHL knew this.
That established, the Canucks acquired a top-six NHL forward, a top-five prospect in a team’s system and a first-round pick that is lottery protected in 2023 (for obvious reasons) but not for 2024. On paper, that’s the kind of return one expects for a center with Horvat’s numbers, age and situation. For example, Claude Giroux went for Owen Tippett as well as first- and third-round picks at the previous trade deadline, and Giroux is eight years older than Horvat.
But trades aren’t made in a vacuum. There are names attached to those categories. Beauvillier is a bit of a diminished prospect at this point in his career. After a breakout campaign in the pandemic-shortened 2020-21 season (1.2 goals per 60 minutes), he regressed last season, and he hasn’t played out of that funk in 2022-23, during which he has just 20 points in 49 games. Beauvillier is 25 years old and under contract through the 2023-24 season at a manageable $4.15 million annual cap hit, even if it’s now a bit high for his production level.
At best, the Canucks have acquired a winger who needed a change in scenery to recapture his game. At worst, this is who Beauvillier is going to be: a winger who shows flashes of upside but never consistency — unless we’re talking about being a defensive liability, for which he has unfortunately been very consistent in his career. Still, he is a player the Canucks could move along in another transaction. He has some value.
Raty, 20, had two goals in 12 games with the Islanders this season. Selected at No. 52 in the 2021 draft, he was considered among the top five prospects in the Islanders’ system, which tells you more about the Islanders’ system than it does Raty. He has good ice vision, and he showed offensive flash playing in SM-liiga in 2021-22, putting up point-per-game numbers. He has yet to show that in North America, but again, Raty is 20 years old with a dozen NHL games to his credit. It all adds up to an intriguing prospect acquired in a package for a player who was leaving anyway.
The Canucks retained 25% of Horvat’s cap hit. That’s a bit surprising but necessary to make this particular deal work.
The reason this trade is a solid B for the Canucks is that they are, for lack of a better term, fading the Islanders. The first-round pick is lottery protected for this draft. Assuming the Horvat trade doesn’t turn this season around — and New York currently has a 12% chance of qualifying for the playoffs — that first-rounder could kick over to 2024, should the Islanders choose. Islanders GM Lamoriello is wagering Horvat signs long term and that the roster he has built is one that’s going to be a contender. The Canucks are wagering the Isles won’t make the playoffs and that the struggles with this roster will continue in 2023-24. Which bet are you backing?