Anaheim Ducks Show Commitment to Winning, Now, on Day Two of Draft
Despite laying low for day one of the 2015 NHL Draft, the Anaheim Ducks hit it out of the park on day two.
Day one of the 2015 NHL Entry Draft will go down as the day that the Boston Bruins and the Buffalo Sabres made some drastic moves in order to get themselves back in the playoffs sooner than later.
Come day two, however, and it was the Anaheim Ducks who were sending notice to the rest of the league: third place ain’t good enough. Beware the Ducks in 2016.
Of course, if you were following the draft from the beginning, you know that the seeds for a busy day two were actually planted on Friday evening.
Kyle Palmieri to New Jersey
Having followed the entire first round of the draft, live-Tweeting throughout every pick and trade announcement, I was sitting at my computer, typing up my reaction to the Anaheim Ducks using the 27th pick on Jacob Larsson.
As I was taking a break to organize my thoughts, this Tweet came up on my timeline:
In and of itself, that trade appeared to do two things for the Ducks: first, it took $1.6 million dollars off of the books for the 2015-2016 season, and cleared up $1.46 million in cap space for the Ducks to use in pursuit of free agents this summer; second, it gave Anaheim a second-round pick in this draft, something they didn’t own heading into Friday. I assumed the Ducks would use said pick to draft either a center or a goaltender.
Hey – for all we know they might have, because some of what happened on Saturday appeared to be a surprise to everyone, including GM Bob Murray, which led to the Palmieri trade inadvertently setting up Anaheim’s best move on day two.
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Anaheim Acquires Anton Khudobin and Carl Hagelin
I was still wiping the sleep from my tired eyes Saturday morning when Twitter informed me that the Ducks had acquired Anton Khudobin from the Carolina Hurricanes for defenseman James Wisniewski. At that point, I had a feeling the Anaheim Ducks were just getting started, and soon enough, right about the time when I was putting some finishing touches on my piece announcing the Khudobin trade, the bomb dropped:
The @NYRangers trade Carl Hagelin's rights, 59th & 179th to @AnaheimDucks for Emerson Etem & 41st pick. #NHLDraft pic.twitter.com/l7rhqxpSuy
— NHL (@NHL) June 27, 2015
Now, this trade was not on the same level as the Colorado Avalanche shipping Ryan O’Reilly to Buffalo, but all you have to do is head to Twitter and read the replies to the Tweet I shared to realize that all 507 of the people who made that Tweet a favorite had to be Ducks fans. Hagelin is a speedy, hard-working forward who will be a huge addition to Anaheim’s penalty kill, and he knows how to score timely goals, as well. While Etem may have more upside than Hagelin, this is clearly a short-term win for the Ducks, to say the very least. And all it took to get this done was the pick that Anaheim acquired for Palmieri, and a whole lot of luck:
"The Hagelin deal sort of popped up and solved one problem we were trying to look at fixing. We may have gotten a little bit lucky on that one."
I got a chance to watch the NHL folks speak with Murray really quickly, and he said he was literally a table away from New York Rangers’ GM Glen Sather. The two were just doing a little table talk, when Sather let it slip that the Rags might have to move Hagelin due to his impending status as an RFA.
That’s not the sort of thing you let the reigning General Manager of the Year know, as Murray proceeded to fleece the Rangers, in my opinion . . . and the opinion of practically every Blueshirts fan in the world. As for the Khudobin trade, having a proven backup goaltender on the roster, with future stud John Gibson honing his game in San Diego, should be enough to guarantee that the Ducks will not have to worry about running out of bodies to duct-tape between the pipes next season.
All in all, Bob Murray and the Ducks front office showed us once again why the Anaheim Ducks are considered to be one of the shrewdest franchises in the NHL. The team showed a commitment to winning now, with the core group that it has, yet still managed to pick up a great prospect in Larsson – sounds like a win-win NHl Draft weekend to me.