The Hockey PDOcast - Behind the Scenes of Trade Deadline Week

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

Dimitri Filipovic is joined by Steve Werier to give a behind-the-scenes look at what trade deadline week is like for teams, how the process of putting together a deal unfolds, and the dynamics at play for negotiating long-term extensions with young players on their second deals.This podcast is produced by Dominic Sramaty If you'd like to gain access to the two extra shows we're doing each week this season, you can subscribe to our Patreon page here: www.patreon.com/thehockeypdocast/membership If you'd like to participate in the conversation and join the community we're building over on Discord, you can do so by signing up for the Hockey PDOcast's server here: https://discord.gg/a2QGRpJc84 The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Media Inc. or any affiliate.

Progressing to the mean since 2015. It's the Hockey PEDEOCast with your host, Dmitri Filipovich. Welcome to the HockeyPedioCast. My name is Demetri Filippovich. And joining me is my good buddy, Steve Wareer. Steve, what's going on, man? Let's get to finally have you on the show. Hey, Dimitri, great to be here.

Looking forward to this. This is going to be fun. So for those that are unfamiliar with your work, and I think a lot of people listening to this show probably are, you're the former AGM of the Panthers, connected to the infamous computer boys era, which was truly, what a time to be alive for all of us on hockey Twitter when it was the Wild Wild West, and we had fun out there.

I'm excited to have you on because I want to talk about sort of back then, of course, your role with the team to bread to the job. But I think for our purposes today, and maybe of more interest to our fan base and our listeners, is just talking to you about the trade deadline. It's sort of perfect timing. I've been trying to get you on the show for a while now. we finally made the schedules work and connect.

And with this week's trade deadline looming, I thought it'd be cool to get a little bit of a behind the scenes peek at the process of the trade deadline from the team perspective within the building, kind of how the stages all line up, how it all comes together because I'm sure listeners are very interested in all that, but we get so little meaningful access in this regard, right? Everyone within the team setting is so secretive and tight-lipped and keeps everything with lock and key and everything we do,

wind up hearing about our learning is very by design or intentional on the team's perspective. So I just thought this would be a unique way for us to prep for the March 8th trade deadline. So I'll give you the floor here. I'm very curious. I guess it starts with kind of the accumulation process, right, in terms of like data collection and maybe putting together a board of targets you're looking after or who you want to contact. How does that sort of work in terms of getting the wheels in motion or kind of greasing the skids

for whatever your team's trying to accomplish? at the trade deadline. Yeah, for sure. Happy to start off there. I mean, to take a step back, you know, the deadline, it's one of those, you know, usually three or so central gathering moment during the year for a team, right? So that's when you have your pro scouts, your management, your amateur scout sometimes as well, all together in person.

And usually you'll have ownership and some others as well to go over a lot of things. And so there's a lot of moving parts, you know, both internally and. externally and you're managing sort of everyone's perspective, everyone's interests. And those can vary, right, depending on where you are as a club and what team, you know, you're working with at that time. And so you bring everyone in and you're sort of hurting cats there and you're saying, all right, you got, you know, your pro scouts are coming in and they're typically saying, you know, I've got that one guy, that diamond in the rough who if we get him for our third

line, he's going to make a big difference. You know, you might have a manager who at the time is saying, all right, we're, you know, six or seven points back of eight plays, but I'm in my last year of my deal, and I really need to, you know, get that piece to push us ahead, whether or not that's necessarily, you know,

the most seamless long-term fit. And then you've got your amateur guys who are sometimes at the table and sometimes remote, and they're banging the table for you saying, hey, hey, hey, you know, let's slow down a little bit. Let's not trade all our picks here. We have a really exciting draft coming up and we can make magic with those picks.

And so you're sort of balancing all of that. And like you said, then you sit down. and you know, you'll typically have a lot of that info already, right? You'll know where you are. You'll, you know, a good team will have given direction, sort of the pro scouts of what are we looking for, who are we looking at? But you refresh, you identify those targets.

You go over where you are as a team, what your strategy is at the deadline. Are you buying or you're selling? Are you maybe doing a hybrid of both? And then you get into what, to me, is the real fun part of it is you do almost the exact same exercise for a lot of other clubs. And when I say that, you mean, I mean, you sort of sit back and say, okay, you know, not only what are these teams, what can they do, meaning where are they roster wise, cap wise, asset wise, but also what do we really think their interests are at this moment in time? And for some teams, that's easy, right? You're looking at a team maybe at the bottom of the standings, early in a rebuild, and they're just looking to maximize their return on their expiring assets. But you might have some other teams where you say, okay, you know, what are they really really?

looking to do here and who's calling the shots and you know example this year might be a team like Columbus right you look at and say okay earlier in the year they apparently had you know some management tendencies where they're looking at adding some big pieces to you know maybe compete earlier than they could and now they've had some changes and you have that black box of wondering okay who's you know who's calling the shots there what are they looking to do what kind of you know what kind of steps and what kind of you know calling card they're looking to sort of throw out there at the deadline looking forward to what they're going to do next. And then you try to mesh sort of what you're looking to do with where you think those teams are to try to make the best moves for your club.

Well, what I'm interested in is, okay, so we start this process in terms of you've identified the players, you identify the team or the fit, and you're going to try to kind of get those wheels in motion. I guess what I'm fascinated about is sort of the initiation process of that then, kind of the whether it's an inquiry, whether it's actual, negotiation because I think there's like semantics certainly involved with and we hear it so many times from so many GMs this time of year where it's like is a player being shopped or are they not and we're quote unquote listening to offers because we have to and it's our job right and then you know you get to the point where Elliott Freeman in his piece yesterday had this anecdote that got picked up by media outlets where it was like oh Chris jury and the Rangers have inquired about Alex tuck with the sabers for example and it.

it becomes a big thing where everyone's talking about it. It's like, oh, my God, they're trying to acquire them. Where in reality, sometimes it's just a matter of sort of doing your due diligence as a GM where you're sort of feeling out where the other teams are with their players, kind of doing your homework and legwork in that regard. How does that sort of start? And how do you manage what gets out publicly, right? Because obviously you're in a tricky spot as a manager where, you know, there's human

lives at stake in terms of where they're living, where they're working, where they're working, they've signed contracts to play there. You don't necessarily want to get it out there that, you know, they're shopping them or you're looking to get rid of them necessarily. So you have to manage that relationship as well. And I imagine that's why so many GMs are very careful about kind of the framing of how available players are at any given time. Yeah, a great question.

I think a lot of the time, it's, it's fun to sit back and say, who's really talking to who here? You hear these media reports? And I say that, I mean, you know, sometimes. times, like you said, you'll have a report of Team X is trying really hard to trade this player. And, you know, that conversation may be really one that's happening between a GM and his own owner. So an owner might say, hey, you know, hey, Dimitri, we really need to trade so and so. And you as GM, you know, maybe it's not so easy to trade that player.

And so it might help you a little bit to have a media report saying, hey, you know, Dimitri is trying really hard to trade so and so. And then the owner sees that and says, oh, Dimitri is working really hard today. good for Dimitri. So there's a little bit of that. I think in the public there tends to be, you know, the excitement of sort of, oh, like, what is the strategy behind this report, you know, who's manipulating you? Who is this report going to lead to some outcome that otherwise wouldn't take place?

You know, I don't think that happens too often. At the end of the day, you know, both the GMs and other GMs and also the GMs and, you know, the big media insider types. they're sort of playing a repeat player game, meaning they deal with each other all the time, and often they deal with each other over, you know, years and years and decades and decades. So, you know, you can sort of play that card of maybe overplaying your hand once or twice. But if, you know, you go to Bob McKenzie, you won too many times saying, hey, you know, we're really looking at a high second or first round pick for that fourth liner of ours,

who's a UFA. And every time you end up getting, you know, a seventh round picker don't trade the player at all, you know, there's sort of a social cost to going a little too hard with those pans. And yeah, I guess the last pieces, sometimes the reporters are really good at their jobs. They have a lot of sources and they might just dig that out. And so something as simple as an inquiry call might, you know, get leaked out by someone on the inside one way or another. And then, you know, oftentimes it may just be, like you said, trying to drive up cost and build a market where you got, you know, really short time period and pretty, pretty high pressures to make a deal.

Well, on the lines of like gauging the market, I guess making sure that it is an open market, I think listeners are generally, the questions I get all the time in the PDO guest discord from people listening to the show are like, how prevalent is teams sort of, not necessarily price enforcing, but like showing interest in players

just to make sure that a rival team doesn't get them for pennies in the dollar, so to speak. Like how making sure, you're involved or you got your hand in a lot of pots at one time from the perspective of like making sure you know who's available and expressing your interest so that if that player does eventually become more available. Let's say a team is kind of on the bubble halfway through the season. They're saying, all right, give us a few weeks to see whether we can make a push for the playoffs or whether we're actually going to sell off, which is a very common occurrence.

Making sure they kind of circle back to you, I guess, when the time comes and when it's more appropriate. I'm very fascinated by that because I think back to the example from back of the day when I think it was with Chris Higgins at the time, but like it got leaked that the Jim Benning and basically just like sent an email to the entire league, making sure that he knew that he was available at the time. It obviously doesn't generally work like that, but just kind of making sure that you're involved with everything so that all of a sudden you're not waking up one morning and finding out that a team you're competing with got a player you would have otherwise interested in for a fraction of the price you would have been willing to pay.

Sure. So a few things on that one. First, you know, I don't know how often sort of the stalking horse bitter scenario takes place where you, you know, you call on a player you might not be interested in in hopes of driving up the price. You know, that may happen sometimes. It may not happen all the time. But, you know, one thing we talked about a lot in our time in Florida, Eric Joyce,

of myself as the two HGMs was, you know, you want to have a value, you know, on every player in the league at all times internally and externally. And you want to know what the prices are. And when there's any symmetry, you know, whether it's at the deadline or otherwise, where you can get a player for a lot more than you think they're worth or there's a player on your team who has a higher value on the market than you might expect, you know, you want to capitalize on those scenarios. And you never know when they come up because, you know, people's interests and organizational mandates change all the time for a variety of reasons. And, you know, to the scenarios you threw out, I can think, you know, one in particular,

your point about, you know, knowing who's available when and not being surprised. It's not a deadline scenario, but I remember one year, and I'm sure you'll be able to pinpoint the exact time, but, you know, one year around the draft or free agency, I picked up the phone and talked to someone, you know, my counterpart in Edmonton, and we were just talking, and I think I said, what are you guys up to? And his response was sort of a flippant joke along the lines of, you know, just looking to trade a 40 goal score. And at the time I was walking around on the street of New York, and I laughed and I hung up the phone.

And an hour later, my phone was buzzing because the other's a trade in Taylor Hall. And when I got that sort of tidbit on the phone, and it never crossed my mind that they'd be looking to trade that player. And they did. And that's just one of, you know, maybe it's not Chris Higgins example, but there's lots of those scenarios where a player, you know, comes into favor, falls out of favor, even with someone who you've been talking to regularly.

So there's definitely no harm in sort of always gauging in the market. Right. I guess the one final step in this process then is kind of pushing the deal through to the finish line, both from the perspective of obviously closing the deal with the team. And I think that is sort of self-explanatory in terms of where you come into the terms, favorable for both sides. You sign off on it.

But I imagine there's also clearly an element, especially if you know, you're taking on a financial burden with an incoming contract, where you also need to run it up the flagpole and basically get sign off from your own ownership, right, in terms of actually making sure this is something the organization's comfortable with doing. I think that's probably one element of it that we hear about in very specific occasional extreme cases. But for the most part, it's not something that we generally think about as fans who are talking about trades. We think about it more so through the lens of just agreeing with the opposing team as opposed to actually agreeing within your own organization. Yeah, so procedurally, you know, with those nuts and bolts of it is, you know, when you come to an agreement on a trade with another club, so you pick up the phone, you call

the other GM, you say, I'll trade this player for that player, they say, okay, let's do it. You know, what happens next before that trade actually gets finalized is you then contact the league at Central Registry. So, you know, you send an email to Central Registry. You say, hey, NHL office, we have a trade. We're trading this player for that player. They put you in a queue. If it's the deadline, you can wait hours before the trade call.

Luckily, they don't put you on a phone hold with bad music. You just wait for the email to come in. But then you get on with the league and the league says, okay, let's go through the two players. And there might be things that pop up like a no trade list or an injury history or there may be insurance complications in terms of whether the player, you know, only a certain number of players are eligible at certain levels for certain types of insurance coverage, which can be super important depending on, you know, the player history and the contract value. And so you run through all that and you, the league make sure, you know,

that each team is fully aware of all those conditions that any trade, you know, trade lists or approvals are done. And then you get to finishing the trade call and that's when the deal is done. You know, if anything comes up before then or even in that process, salary wise or, you know, otherwise, you know, you run that back internally. And, you know, In terms of ownership, buying, it depends on the season and the team, obviously. But, you know, if we go back to our scenario, really an unexpected player or trade comes available, you definitely are usually running that up all the way to ownership, unless you've got the directive.

I think a lot of teams, the owner is probably in the room or readily at the phone. Deadline weeks, so there aren't any surprises. But you definitely don't usually pick up the phone after and say, hey, we just grab this 50 million dollar player we'd never talk to you about before. That's usually not the best recipe for long-term success. What's deadline week like when you're in that chair in terms of like just walk me through the full week, let's say we're starting the trade deadlines on the Friday, on the Monday, just in terms of like activity in terms of, you know, what the process is like from how like

just everything you're doing essentially in terms of like calls in terms of internal meetings in terms of all that stuff, assuming that there's no like pressing trade at the moment or you're kind of just in a general position of your fielding offers, you're interested, but you're not necessarily at the finish line yet. Sure. So, you know, typical week, you gather your front office and your scouts,

so you have your pro scouts who are flying in from all over around the league, and they come down on site to wherever your team is. And you sort of lock yourself in a conference room, usually a windowless room with some bad donuts and coffee. early Monday morning, you know, sit around a big table with a screen, everyone's laptops open. And, you know, if you have some time, you'll go through the same thing you go through at your other all-hands meetings where your skills will go through their teams. So, you know, if you have five pro scouts, each one will go through their six or seven teams

and say, you know, here's my update on this team. So here's how I rate their players. Here's where I think they are. Here's how I think, you know, their coaches are valuing these players versus those players, importantly, here's how their HL team is doing. And here's some players who are really pushing for a roster spot. So that might be step one. So you go through each team like that. And then once the pro scouts given his

overview, you might have someone in my position who's ever doing the cap and contract works for the team in an AGM type role who might then sit down or stand up and say, okay, here's what we see where this team is. They're up against the cap. They're looking to add pieces based on where they are in the standing we'd think in a playoff spot. And, you know, here's also where they are in terms of their players who might be RFAs or UFA's at NMD. Or here's what we'd expect them to need to pay to keep those players that we think they want to keep. And here's why we don't think they can

keep, you know, some of these other players. And then you put it all together and say, okay, you know, where's there a fit? And so the first day or two may just be going through team by team, updating your profiles, updating your tendencies. If you want to get really detailed, One thing we like to do is say, all right, we're looking at, you know, Toronto, who's Toronto's GM right now? What are the types of deals he's done? You know, what are the deal structures? Is it picks for prospects? Is it player for player? Does he like to take on salary? Does he like to do complicated deals? What has he done in the past where he's been, you know, pushing to make the playoffs when he's been out out by a little bit and get it, you know, you build that profile and say,

okay, let's think of the types of scenarios we may want to pitch to this team based on what we know about them and what we think their interests are. You know, that usually takes up the first couple of days or so of the week. Obviously, there's interruptions, you know, not around the clock, but very often where, you know, the GM or the team president are, you know, constantly taking calls. You know, phone is just ringing nonstop from other clubs. And some of it's really interested. Some of it is just like, hey, what are you hearing or what are you up to?

Or, you know, do you hear this team might be doing this? What do you think of that? And sometimes it might just be, you know, updates on trades you're working on. So you might have inquired, like you said, about, you know, player on a specific team and you're saying, hey, this is our offer? What do you think? And they might tell you, you know, I have these offers that are this much better. I'm holding out for this.

You know, call me back or less touch base, you know, in this amount of time. But sort of a mix of that. And then once you get closer to, you know, deadline day or the day before, you're sort of done your team profiling, done your strategy. and just sitting around and waiting to hopefully make the deals you're looking to make. Something I always talk about on this show, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, or if it's a mischaracterization. But from everything I've gathered in kind of conversations I've had,

I always say that I think the general fan or listener would be a bit surprised with like how much of the day-to-day. Now, obviously, that this differs with the week of the trade deadline, as you talked about, you've got everyone all hands on deck, you're kind of pitching all these different scenarios is familiarizing yourself with everything, exploring all the options. But otherwise, in a typical week of a regular season or a given year, how much of the time and energy and effort is kind of spent internally with just prioritizing your own team versus sort of keeping tabs with what's going on

around the league and being deeply entrenched in how a third liner on a team in the opposite conference is performing? Because I think generally a lot of people are like, oh, well, a team's GM must be aware of how everyone's doing it is keeping a close eye on it. But I think for the most part, it typically a lot of the focus is directed in-house with your own team. And then you have people whose specific job it is to sort of put together a portfolio in terms of like notes and information that you're eventually going to use when the time comes calling. Yeah, you're totally right. And I mean, it goes to something we talked about a lot or a couple of things we talked about a lot and four at the time.

You know, one was who do we really need to focus on? And that's like everyone as we, but as a team, like, who do we really need to focus on at other teams at a moment in time? Meaning if you have a scout who has, you know, Toronto as one of their teams will keep using Toronto. They probably don't need to give you a detail report during the year on, you know, Austin Matthews or Mitch Marner or, you know, the big superstars who you know, there's no way they're getting traded. And, you know, they probably don't need to give you a report on a few of the

other players who they know knowing your club, you know, we probably won't be interested in during the year. So part of that is drilling down on like what are our real goals during the year and give us real detailed reports and insights onto, you know, potential candidates. But, you know, to your point, there's a ton of internal stuff. Sort of part of being in team management is you're, you're almost an HR manager to a degree. You know, you're managing scouts. You've got coaches, players, scouts, you know, team services, travel personnel, your own players, you know, you're dealing with your own sort of ownership and management and internal constituents. And there's just so much going on during that season

that you need to be, you know, and rightfully so, but delegating sort of the player analysis and outside fun stuff to people you know and trust to do that work. That's definitely the case. Good stuff. Okay. Is there anything else on trade deadline week or the trade deadline itself that you think would be interesting as whether it's an actual specific end, or kind of just a procedural thing that we haven't gone to. I feel like we've kind of covered most of the big talking points, but I'm kind of curious if you think we've missed anything that we should address. Yeah, I think we've got a pretty good lay of the land.

I'll tell you about the one hiccup I once threw into a trade call that almost derailed a trade, which is a good lesson in keeping things straight. On the up and up, this wasn't a deadline deal, but it's one you'll like, you're from Vancouver. Yes. you know, like I said, we do, you do these trade calls, and they're very formal. And, you know, someone, Daniel or Andrew from the league comes on and they say, do we have Florida, do we have Vancouver?

What is the trade? You know, have we reviewed this? Have we reviewed that? Okay. You know, and, you know, the trade is final when you hang up and that's that. Most of them are very regimented. I remember on the trade we did was the Canucks. I think it was the Jared McCann trade.

We walked. we were walking through the deal and there were a number of people for each team was on the call and you know, the league asked who was present, the league asked what the deal was and I jumped in and I said you know, Florida is trading so-and-so and Vancouver is trading

Jared McCann and then I paused and said and also Daniel and Henrik Sidene and there was a long awkward silence before very tepid laughter and for a second I thought we might be in a little bit trouble on the trade but luckily we were selling the deal got done that's the only sort of that's a great co-acto I can

pull it in mind right now that I'll keep thinking anymore. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, there's a time in place for jokes. Okay, let's squeeze in a break here and then we come back, we will jump right back into the conversation with Steve Warrior. You're listening to the Hockey Kodi-Kast streaming on the Sportsnet Radio Network. Everything Kinnucks

before and after the games. Canucks Central with Dan Riccio and Satyar Shaw. Subscribe and download the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. right, we're back here on the Hockey P.D.O. cast joined by Steve Warrier as we talk. What we did in the first part, we talked about the trade deadline and kind of look behind the scenes from a team perspective at how this week unfolds. Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about more sort of

big picture philosophical team building, sort of organizational stuff. And I want to start with contracts because that was sort of, you played an instrumental role in negotiating a lot of the deals for the Panthers during that era. And that was kind of the main breadth of your job. And I'm fascinated by this. You and I have spoken quite a bit about it over text, but I want to get into it here. Just this idea of like, obviously the landscape is changing somewhat in the NHL, maybe a bit more slowly than we've seen in other sports, but we know that finally the cap will be going up over the next couple years. I think we've seen certainly in the past couple seasons, young superstar players sort of flexing their might in terms of still being our phase or a year out from

having total control, but still leveraging that to get to where they want to long term. So we're reaching this kind of fascinating crossroads, I think, from a team perspective where I think teams would still be well served and right to, you know, you identify your core. You want to commit to it. And then so when you have a young player coming off their ELC, you want to go long term to buy as many UFA years as you can so that you're hopefully reaching this point with the cap going up where all of a sudden you're getting surplus value. they're reaching their peak seasons.

They're producing at a level that's higher than the price you're paying them. And it all works out well and good. Now, obviously from a player perspective, I think the pushback would be, well, we kind of realized that this environment's changing and we actually want to get to UFA sooner, not only to control where we go, but also to maximize our earning power. So this dynamic or power struggle between player and team isn't necessarily anything new. And maybe it's changed quite a bit since, you know, you were doing this stuff with the Panthers. but I'm fascinated for your take on sort of the evolution of that, I guess,

and kind of that dynamic between player and team and figuring out what makes sense for both. Yeah, for sure. I mean, back when I was doing it, it was a huge piece, like you said. It was something, you know, I spent a lot of time sort of internally selling and ultimately, you know, we were successful at executing was, like you said, that second contract for really high-end elite players. And we had a few of them, you know, with Barkov and Ekplad and Huberdil as well,

it was his third deal, but his first long-term deal. And at that time, there was a huge discrepancy between, you know, what a player might sign for as a UFA at 27 or older and what you might be able to sign a player for, even if he was, you know, an elite top-end, you know, franchise-defining player on that second post-entry level contract. And because of that, there were, you know, there were a number of really, really strong reasons why,

as a team, you could get a lot of value from signing those guys. And if you look back sort of when I started doing those deals, you know, Barkhog deal, Uber to O and F, Plaid, and deals like that, you know, even if you look around it, sort of the similar players who signed deals around those time, that time and what they might have, you know, signed for as free agents or today,

it was just wildly different. So, you know, around Barkov, you had, you know, Nathan McKinn, both those guys signing long-term deals in the, you know, I think, five-nine. to what, six million-ish range, which is vastly below their market value both now and then. And, you know, there's a lot of other reasons to really push for that as a team that we talked about. You know, one of them was you could lock up a player for their prime of their career, but you also didn't have to commit to too long after their prime.

And when I say that, I mean, if you're signing a player off their entry-level deal, you know, they're typically somewhere in the range of 22 to 23. and you can sign them under the old CBA for eight years for an eight year extension. Or now for a seven-year deal. But in any event, you're signing that player from age, say, 22 or 23 to 30. Those are typically prime, prime performance years. Contrast that with if you took the approach of saying, hey, we aren't totally certain on this player yet,

or maybe you just can't get there with the agent in negotiating. and you do say a bridge deal for two or three years, well, then you're in the spot where you might have a little more data on the player, which you may or may not need depending on how great they are, you know, for the Barkoffs and McKinnons, you certainly didn't. But then you're in the conundrum of saying, all right, this player is now 25-ish, you know, in addition to having leverage and arbitration rights and being close to being a UFA,

you know, if you're looking at a max-term deal to sort of lower the AAB over the term, you know, you're looking at signing them through age 32 or 33, and you're running into a little more risk in terms of valuation age and all that. And to your point as well, obviously there's a bit of a hiccup on this the last couple years and sort of hit around the time. Some teams did some extensions, but typically, you know, the cap goes up over time. And so the earlier you can sign a player to a deal relative to the size of the cap. You know, the deal is going to have value as the cap rises and the contract stays the same size.

and then, you know, just in any scenario, the thing that we also talked about a lot that we valued was you have that certainty. You know, as soon as you lock a franchise player, you have that number down. It's on your cap table. It gives you the ability to build your roster around them. And it also has that, obviously, the cultural value of saying, hey, you know, here's a signature asset who's committed to the market. That's a good internal signal to other players, but it's also a good, you know, external signal to, you know, your market and your fan base and everyone else. I think you're right. That's changed a lot over the past few years.

It's changed a ton in the NBA, which is a real player-driven league. I think both players, agents, you know, as well are a little less risk-averse than they might be in the NHL. And so over time, you know, certainly as we've seen a little bit, but probably more, you'll see a trend. You'd think more towards players having more agency over their careers and saying, you know, I'm comfortable with taking the risk of a short-term deal and control. where I play and maybe who I play with like they do in the NBA.

Well, and I imagine one of the other sort of maybe hidden, but maybe even obvious in plain sight benefits from a team perspective is you set that sort of internal structure. And obviously as times change, even a couple of years down the road, obviously the circumstances might be wildly different. But I imagine it helps like once you get Barkov in for those six years of 5.9 that you had, then when it comes time for Hubert O and Trocheck, it's a lot easier to kind of point.

to that as an example and be like, well, this is where we're at, as opposed to if you hadn't set that baseline, that all of a sudden it becomes much more variable, I guess, in terms of asks and kind of what's realistic from the organization's perspective. So you're saying it's not just a coincidence that Barcobb and Hoover both signed for 5.9. I mean, it's weird how you got to those exact same numbers for those two players. It's quite a mystery. Yeah, I know.

I mean, let me talk about that. It's a good anchoring signal. No, it's not exact, right? Like Huberto was coming off, a bridge deal that was done before my time. And there was some backstory there that I sort of took the position that wasn't material since, you know, we hadn't done that deal.

And every deal sort of stands on its own. But absolutely, you know, to the extent you can sort of create that internal ceiling and enforce it, which are two different things, that helped a lot. That certainly helped us that offseason where we, you know, we had a very sort of comprehensive plan of wanting to sign a number of players, you know,

again, after Barkov, Hubert O, at Plaid, Trocheque, Riley Smith as well to, to extension, so to have that ceiling and to say,

you know, you know, we understand and we emphasize, you know, with the agent to say Trocheck, that he's a great young player, but we don't think he's going to make the argument that he's, um,

greater than Barkov. Um, and Barkov's at X, you know, that that, helps, but it also really helps in terms of just knowing what dollars you have and what you can prioritize. And then whether you have a flexibility to do some other fun stuff like going after bigger fish or offer sheets or just big trades of the like having that caps certainty in place.

How do you feel about, you know, this idea of a market as a destination? Because I imagine that, you know, at one time the Panthers weren't necessarily an organization that was like, oh, that's a winning team. That's a really fun place to play. That's exactly where I want to go. And I'm a player who's going to kind of push my way there or really prioritize being there. Now obviously they've become that over time.

There's also the angle that people love to talk about of like a tax perspective and how that works in terms of those little competitive advantages potentially. But this sort of idea because you could also use a team like the Jets, for example, on the other extreme where they obviously have to bake this into all their decisions, right? They're looking at players.

that they'll be able to retain players who are under contract, who they can have at a reasonable price moving forward, and the benefits that provides them, knowing that they're not necessarily playing in the same pool as an LA or a Toronto or a New York. Yeah, I think at the macro level, there might be a little bit of that at sort of the individual player level, you know, might be a little less so.

You know, different people at different life stages and, you know, have different sort of priorities in terms of where they want to be. I think there's still a huge sort of, you know, selling points in the league of, you know, players, sort of if they're happy where they are, you know, not necessarily a desire or need to go change. Sort of when you're looking at those second and third deals where only the team who's, or has your rights has the ability to offer you that big contract. You know, you're getting into a lot of risk by saying, okay, I want to go shorter if you're not really in the, you know,

top of league player to turn down a, you know, maybe significant contract. and it might be really like your, you know, it's your first opportunity to make, you know, generational life-altering money. So it's a tough decision sort of for a player to forego, their first long-term deal from their own market to look sort of somewhere else down the line. But then it's also, you know, it's not just geography,

it's also culture and, you know, teams over time build, you know, internal cultures within whatever city they're in, they can attract players despite maybe the external perception otherwise. and, you know, when it pick, it's a good example of sort of the sentiment of maybe it's hard to draw players. And then you look this offseason and they, you know, sign sort of their franchise forward and franchise goalie to max long term long term that might have wanted that conventional wisdom. Yeah. I'm, I'm so fascinated by this idea of players in terms of like dictating the term and kind of their willingness to bet on themselves or inherit that risk or be risk of burst kind of as you.

put it because it can certainly go both ways. And I think it's easy for us here from the outside with no skin in the game to be like, oh, of course you should bet on yourself and try to maximize their earnings since your career and earning power is as short as it is relative to a typical job. At the same time, not only is it generational life-changing money, but there's also so much uncertainty. Hockey's a very violent game. Anything can happen at any time and your circumstances can change. And so, you know, if you're presenting 20, 30, 40 million dollars in front of a player of being like, we're willing to give this to you and lock it in. Do you want to sign up? I think most people would say yes, even if it means leaving another 5, 10, 10, 15 million

on the table on the back end of it. But at the same time, you get into this opposite extreme, I guess, where I can't stop thinking about Elias Lindholm and his situation. And now he's obviously here in Vancouver. We'll see how the rest of this season and whatever playoff run he has with the Canucks dictates things. There's always going to be a market for him because we know the earth of centers and he's very respected by a reputation perspective around the league. But he was in this weird spot where he committed long term at kind of a cut rate, right? I think it was under $5 million for six years that he signed. And then he has this monster 40-goal season playing with the Chuck and Goodrow.

He watches them go out the door because they've sort of timed their own leverage accordingly. And then not only as he's stuck there without them, but he has to watch other players cash in. And then now, two years later, I can't help but think what his sort of leverage or asking price is like compared to what it would have been as a 27 year old hitting the open market off of 40 goals compared to the situation he's in now. So you kind of get both of those extremes, I guess. And there's no right answer. I guess it all depends on a sort of individual case-by-case basis what your appetite for risk is. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's one thing where you're on the side of, you know, being on the management side of things where you're.

deal with the player and you're, you know, talking to the agent on behalf of the player. You know, the agent's job is to be a zealous advocate and to sort of maximize the players sort of deal or contract value, both, you know, most of the time with few exceptions. And, you know, you're sitting on their side table and you have to think, okay, you know, are they really going to walk away, like you said, from $30 million when the player's been making $800,000 under prior deals or is the agent sort of posturing, sort of asking for more and, and, you know, saying, you know, we'll hold it out for this or we'll wait for that. You have to sort of read the room right.

And like you said, there's, you know, there's lots of examples on each side of, you know, maybe committing to too many years or too much term or to, you know, to one market that, that changes quickly. And, you know, depends on sort of the player on the team and, you know, their values and perspective. Well, one of the other benefits, though, of going long term on that second deal with your star players is, you know, I guess preventing issues down the road of exposing them to threat via offer sheet or kind of at least keeping the door open for that, right? And it's not something that we certainly see utilized a lot of the NHL.

But I did warn you that I was going to ask you about this before getting you on. And I have to talk to you about it because it's kind of this urban legend that's spoken about in hush, hush tones. I've never really, I'm not sure if Freedom in America have ever actually talked about it on their show. But you kind of hear about it time and again. This idea of when Kucharov was coming off of his ELC, we know that he didn't wind up signing his bridge deal,

which was a 4.76 by 3 bridge one day before the start of that season. And he was coming off a postseason where I think he had like 11 playoff goals and 17 games or something during the lightning run. And the lightning were obviously very vulnerable in that moment, but no one stepped up to the plate. And funny enough, that's a recurring theme for them during this run of lightning hockey where they've kind of gotten away with that time and time again. Now it takes the player actually signing with someone else to sort of put those wheels in motion.

And we know that players sometimes aren't willing to do so because they want to stay there. They like where they're at. But there was this sort of talk about you guys exploring this idea. I'm kind of curious how that came to be and also like how far down the line it came and give me as much as you can in terms of sort of those sequence of events that led up to that summer, I guess, of 2016. No, sorry. You're mistaken. I'm not sure actually what you're referring to.

You're not just getting a statement. It's been out of a year. All of a sudden, the call is just dropped. You're like, this podcast is done now. We apologize to our sponsors. Yeah, I still,

I'll start at the beginning. I mean, let's start with like the theoretical question, which is if hockey is a strong link game, meaning you need like world beating, top of the lineup players to have, you know, year in,

year out success. How do you get that talent? Right? Like how do you get those generational players? And there's a few ways to do it. You know, one's the draft. Once through trade, which is rare because teams usually don't trade players who are that great at that level. Three is to sign them as unrestricted free agents, but again, super rare. Those players rarely come up on the market.

And when they do, it's usually prohibitive. And then the fourth is this tool that's in the CBA called the offer sheet, which has been occasionally, and at the time, you know, we're talking about, rarely used and even more rarely used, sort of in the context that it might be the most potent, which is you can go to a team that hasn't signed a, you know, a restricted free agent of certain seniority and you can basically poach them. And depending on how high a value contract you offer them, that team's entitled to compensation. And like you said, in 2016, and it's changed significantly since then, but in 2016, and it might be a little bit off, You know, if you wanted to offer a sheet of player for a contract up to $7 million in change per year,

it would cost you a first round pick, a second round pick, and a third round pick in future drafts, which, you know, if you're looking at your team and saying, let's look at where we are and then let's add an exceptional player to our team, you know, where will that draft pick be? And you might be comfortable with that, that is compensation. So, you know, we had those conversations, our management team at the beginning of the year, as we sort of took over that offseason, Eric Joyce and myself and a few others. And we said, how do we transform this team? You know, we thought we had a good team, but how do we can, you know, what could we do to sort of, you know, transform it to an upper echelon team?

And sort of looking at the idea of an offer sheet. And like you said, I think earlier on the pod, is, you know, there's a few things you want to do maybe before putting down a big offer sheet like that. first one is you want to have enough cap states to absorb the offer to the player. And if you look sort of at our offseason, you'll see, you know, what we did was we traded away a couple sort of third contract mid-20s defensemen in the four or five million dollar range took there a little space. Once we did that, the next step was, like you mentioned, you want to lock up the pieces of your team that might be targeted of offer sheets in retribution, which isn't to say like it's guaranteed that you'll be the target of an offer sheet, because you extend one, but we thought, given the players we had and also who we were as a new management group, we'd probably be targeted. And so the next step was we made sure to, you know, in addition to Bartow who'd been signed,

we extended, you know, Ekblad around the time of the draft to a long-term deal. Great player, would have signed him anyway, but wanted to make sure we had him locked up as well. And we also locked up Huberto, Trochik, and Smith, just to give us cost certainty of knowing where we'd be cap-wise. So then we're getting to the part you're asking about, which was once we got through those steps, we did look at where we were instead, you know, here's Coutheraw, here's a Tampa team. That is close to being capped out by all public accounts, like he said, they're offering him something in the range of four, something per year. You know, our R&D analytics folks, and we were known to have a few of them at the time.

We're pretty confident that Coucherob was worth, you know, multiples of that. And so we, we decided to move forward with it. And we, you know, we talked internally, talked with ownership and,

and explored sort of the different scenarios. And ultimately it got to the point where I got together with, with Kutraulte's agents in New York one weekend where they were based, Michael Deuch. And, and, you know, they were committed, sorry,

to say, you know, you know, he's going to sign with you absolutely. If you operate X, but we look at the parameters of what we might be willing to willing to offer, you know, given the offer sheet set up and what Tampa was offering at the time. You know, we took that back internally and we took it back all the way through the preseason.

And, you know, it was a subject of a number of discussions internally. Ultimately, you know, it was decided in our org that we weren't going to extend an offer sheet unless we had 100% certainty that we would get the player. And there were a number of reasons for that. But that was the decision that we weren't going to go all the way to this step and all the sort of dominoes and ramifications of it that might come up. Unless we could say without exception that if we signed this offer sheet, this player will be on our team next year. And the thing was an offer sheet is a team has a week to decide to match. And ultimately, as we looked into that, we thought this would be tough for Tampa.

It wouldn't be easy. And certainly, as we've seen with like cap crunch teams, there might be a high price they might have to pay. in terms of picks and other compensation to move a few pieces around. But we ultimately just didn't get over that hump of saying, there's no way they won't match for a player this kid. So we didn't do it. And listen, I'm sure there's lots of teams over history and lots of scenarios that have been thrown around

similar exciting ideas like that. But that might be where your urban legend came from. And luckily for us, Kusraub didn't turn out to be that great of a player. Just kidding. No, no, no, definitely not. Wow, that's a fascinating what if that I'm sure listeners will be very interested in. And yeah, it's crazy to think about how different the past like, what, seven or eight years of the NHL hockey would have been.

Okay, one final thing here. I want to ask you about sort of what's next in terms of hidden value for organizations to exploit areas of investment because I think everyone agrees that, and I certainly teams, it varies in terms of how much they've already invested to it, how much they're utilizing it, how much they're incorporating it into their decision-making, both from a personnel perspective, but also in terms of actual on-ice application in terms of analytics and sort of that area of things. I'm curious for your take because the gap has shrunk there certainly. I think everyone, for the most part, is at least doing something now compared to maybe

2015 when it still was so polarizing. What's your take on kind of what's next? What are uncharted waters, kind of what organizations could be doing better to sort of improve their product, whether it is actually on the ice or whether it is just kind of the way they run their operations all of it. Yeah, I mean, I think you're totally right. The gap is shrunk. And that was something that we talked about with like maximum urgency back in 2014, 15, which was there's a competitive advantage right now that certain teams are valuing players

very obviously in ways that we with high confidence think is wrong. and that won't be the case forever. And then when you saw, you know, folks like, you know, Kyle Dubus become GM in Toronto and changes like that, it became very apparent, like the gap is narrowing and the league won't always be like this. And there's a narrow window to make, you know, certain types of moves with certain sort of mental models.

That won't always be the case. You'll have like-minded people to some extent everywhere, eventually, which certainly is the case right now. You know, second part of your question, where can those edges be? gained. I think he threw out uncharted waters. I'll sort of punt on that and say, I think, you know, the advantage is not necessarily uncharted waters as much as like diving deeper into existing waters. You know, often there's a tendency to say, hey, we're doing a little bit of this now.

Let's not do too much. And I think like the counter to that is to, you know, if you look at the league, you have the constraint of a salary cap. Teams can only spend so much on players. There's only so much wiggle room sort of within and around that in terms of stuff like LTI and so on. but there's no office cap. And, you know, sports teams are lucky that they can attract really, you know, brilliant minds in terms of research, analysis, human performance, psychology, medical training, all that stuff. You know, there's brilliant people who want to work for those teams,

these teams in those areas and they're available. And to just say, you know, we have eight people in our R&D department or, you know, in our human performance group, you know, double it. triple it. I think you see that already, especially in the NFL, NBA as well, where you have these just huge work builds that build out, massive state of the art new practice facilities and teams doing everything to sort of maximize, you know, they're on ice performance, so to speak, but also they're off ice training and all that. I think that's something that isn't necessarily done across the board in hockey ed is probably being done more and more. And certainly if you listen to, you know,

some of the folks who've publicly evangelized over, you know, getting those edges, you know, people like Mike Gillis and others who have, you know, talked about, you know, psychology and performance and training and things like that, you know, there's probably more more ground to be gained on that, you know, thinking back to our group that we start to build out, you know, we had some folks in, in R&D, you know, like Cam Lawrence and others who started doing some interesting work. And I think sort of the extension of that isn't necessarily, oh, we need to do all these other things, but, you know, just building out those groups, having more really, like, diversity of minds and also diversity of backgrounds and opinions,

I think that can help tremendously. I think that's sort of been done a lot more in a lot of places since 10 years ago, including Florida. But yeah, I think sort of that may be best way going forward to. Well, I think that's right. I was telling you this off the record, or off the air, I should say it is on the record. and I think I've spoken about it in the past, but whenever fans get upset with the Golden Knights for their abuse of LTIR and kind of trying to circumvent the cap and all this stuff,

I always think that's sort of a bit of a red herring. Like, if anything, you should be sort of frustrated with your own organization for not willing to spend what it takes to win a cup, right? Like amidst all of that is doling out a ton of money, like leaving no expense spared, leaving no stone unturned, like just trying to do everything, exploit every single possible advantage that pushes you closer to the mountaintop of the sport. And that's one of those ways, not to mention all like the first class stuff and just state of the art facilities and everything that they've sunk into that organization. So I think that's a really astute point. I think something

that we'll certainly see more of as we move forward. All right, Steve, I'm going to have to let you go here because we are out of time today, unfortunately. But the good news is that we left a lot of meat on the bone. And that means I'm going to hold you to coming back on sometime early this off season. in the summer to talk about draft prep, your work with Cam Lawrence and the computer boys there during your time together in Florida, and a whole host of other fun team-building stuff that I wanted to dig into with you. So I'm already looking forward to that. Thank you to Steve Warrior for coming on. Thank you to the listeners for listening to us. Hopefully you enjoyed our chat. And I'll see you in a couple days back on this feed when we get back together on Friday evening

with the mega trade deadline recap show, which will hopefully give us a lot of stuff to unpack and fun traits to discuss. So looking forward to that. In the meantime, if you're looking for some content to keep you busy and get you ready for that March 8th trade deadline, go back and listen to last week's trades we'd like to see episode where we spend two hours pitching fun trades. A lot of them probably won't happen, but that doesn't mean we can't dream anyways. And so go enjoy those and get ready for the festivities. So enjoy the trade deadline.

And we'll be back soon with more of the HockeyPedioCast streaming on the SportsNet Radio Network.