Saturday, February 16, 2008

What the sellers have to offer

With a big number of teams, currently, out of the Playoff Picture, a slew of players could be available by the Trade Deadline.

Amongst these teams are the Los Angeles Kings, Toronto Maple Leafs, Edmonton Oilers, St. Louis Blues, Tampa Bay Lightning, New York Islanders and Chicago Blackhawks.

All these teams have interesting unrestricted free-agents come July 1st, except the Edmonton Oilers, but do not rule them out as sellers, as they have an important number of young defencemen and forwards that could be on the way out (except Gagner, Cogliano, Pitkanen...).

The teams with the most valuable assets to ship off is the Tampa Bay Lightning. Their UFAs include Dan Boyle, Vaclav Prospal and Chris Gratton. Boyle and Prospal would be welcome on any team, as for Gratton, his 55% faceoff success rate makes him somewhat of an intriguing option as a 3rd line center.

The Blackhawks along with the Oilers are the out-of-the-race teams that have the least to offer.
The Blackhawks seem to be willing to keep their young core of players together, and therefore only have UFAs Martin Lapointe and Andrei Zyuzin. Edmonton is in the same situation and their only ''notable'' UFA is Geoff Sanderson.

The Maple Leafs and Kings, respectively 29th and 30th in league standings, have some valuable UFAs to offer. Mats Sundin is most notably the top UFA forward in the market this year as the Trade Deadline approaches, and Toronto's only asset, if they decide to not trade Tomas Kaberle.
The Kings' notable UFAs include Rob Blake and Ladislav Nagy.

Finally, the Blues and Islanders also have some valuable assets to offer. St. Louis, unable to re-sign Barret Jackman up until this point in time, might be forced to trade him, and the Islanders surely want to get something in return for UFAs Miroslav Satan, Trent Hunter and Bryan Berard.

The Market this year seems quite bleek from a 100% sellers point of view, but wait until Trade Deadline day to see where Atlanta (UFAs: F Marian Hossa, F Bobby Holik, F Mark Recchi, D Steve McCarthy, G Johan Hedberg), Columbus (UFAs: F David Vyborny, F Sergei Fedorov, F Mike Peca, D Adam Foote) and Vancouver (UFAs: F Markus Naslund, F Brendan Morrison) stand, as their position could force them to add some valuable assets to the Trade Pool.

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