If the plan was for the NHL’s Western Conference to make the disparity between its 16 teams and those of the much stronger Eastern Conference even more apparent, it has been executed rather effectively.
As of Monday, the top six teams were all in the East, and five of the six worst were in the West. It doesn’t get more lopsided than that.
The past few weeks, meanwhile, have also seen a parade of some of the West’s best players heading to Eastern clubs, with compensation mostly in the form of prospects and draft picks the other way.
The West may be stronger five years from now. But for the moment, the talent drain has flowed East, where most of the best teams reside.
It should be pointed out that Colorado won the Stanley Cup last year, so the disparity can’t be too bad. That said, the arms race in the Eastern Conference that has so far involved the Maple Leafs, Islanders, Lightning, Devils, Rangers and Bruins strongly suggests that if you’re a betting person, this year’s champion is more likely to come from east of the Mississippi.
Even an aging Tampa Bay team has felt compelled to deal futures for immediate help despite the fact it could prove disastrous to the team’s future, particularly since these kinds of bold deadline moves rarely make the difference and are almost always very costly. Faced with likely having to beat two of the NHL’s top four teams — Boston and Toronto — just to get out of the Atlantic Division, general manager Julien BriseBois felt motivated to make a very aggressive trade late Sunday to acquire winger Tanner Jeannot from the Nashville Predators.
Jeannot, 25, broke through with 24 goals last season, but has taken a slight step backwards. BriseBois packaged 24-year-old Cal Foote, a six-foot-five defenceman and former first-rounder, along with Tampa’s 2025 first-round pick, a 2024 second-round selection and this year’s third-, fourth- and fifth-round picks to get Jeannot.
It wasn’t Herschel Walker to the Vikings, but it sure seemed like a lot.
“The reality at the trade deadline is, you’re going to have to overpay,” said BriseBois. “We have a really good idea what the value of those picks is … I’d rather have the good player now for this season and next and try to help this group win. None of those draft picks were going to help us win now.”
Logically, he’s right. At least BriseBois made the ’25 first-rounder top-10 protected, because that could become a factor for an extremely successful team that has already traded away much of its future and has a big chunk of its roster at age 32 or older.
What else was BriseBois to do? He had seen his team give up six goals in a loss to Buffalo, then get badly outplayed and outcompeted in Detroit despite coming out with a 3-0 win, then get whipped 7-3 on Sunday night by a Pittsburgh team that has been awful lately.
He had also watched the Bruins, Leafs, Rangers, Islanders and Devils add significant players. Not surprisingly, on the plane home from Pittsburgh, he pulled the trigger on the Jeannot deal.
So, you’ve got Nashville in the West sending a good player to Tampa in the East, and there have been more like that. Vancouver dealt Bo Horvat to Long Island. St. Louis traded Ryan O’Reilly and Noel Acciari to the Leafs, and Vladimir Tarasenko to the Rangers. In a massive deal, San Jose dealt Timo Meier to the Devils for a boatload of picks and prospects. Then on Monday, the Leafs acquired defenceman Jake McCabe and forward Sam Lafferty from the Blackhawks.
In terms of Eastern teams selling short-term help to Western clubs, Montreal peddled journeyman Evgenii Dadonov to Dallas, and that’s it as of Monday evening, while we were still expecting Patrick Kane to go from Chicago to the Rangers, another elite player moving from West to East.
Moving West in all these deals, meanwhile, has been a bewildering array of futures, some of them conditional on unknowable. Some of these deals, such as the Meier and McCabe/Lafferty swaps, are almost impossible to untangle in terms of understanding the price that was paid to acquire help before Friday’s deadline.
That’s part of the beauty of it for the executives doing the dealing.
Nobody can really understand what Chicago GM Kyle Davidson or San Jose GM Mike Grier is getting because we won’t know for years. Similarly, BriseBois could point to Jeannot as a “top nine forward” who is affordable at $800,000 (U.S.) before becoming a restricted free agent this summer without anyone really being able to articulate precisely what he had surrendered.
He made it sound like nothing, because he’s trying to win now.
“Our focus right now is grabbing an opportunity to do something with this season,” BriseBois said Monday. “We have all the ingredients to go on a long run.”
The NHL has been around since 1917 and teams have always done this type of thing. That’s what they should do. That’s what fans paying for tickets and merchandise deserve, although those same fans will turn around in two months and heap scorn on BriseBois, Kyle Dubas, Chris Drury, Don Sweeney and Tom Fitzgerald if their teams get whipped in the first round of the playoffs.
For years, the consensus was that the Western Conference was better than the East. Now, it’s the other way around. Down the road, when all these futures kick in, it will undoubtedly reverse again.
By then, we’ll have forgotten what was done in the name of winning and rebuilding back in the winter of 2023.
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