The phone calls flew fast and furious in the days leading up to the NHL’s trade deadline. But before the conversations even started, Capitals general manager George McPhee made one thing clear to his fellow GMs: The kids are not for sale.
That’s because as much as Washington’s front office wants to take advantage of this immediate window to win a Stanley Cup, it also won’t mortgage the future. Not yet. And especially not for what was available on the trade market this week.
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“It actually made the trading deadline harder because we were so high on these guys that when you tell teams that you’ve got five guys that we won’t talk about it seems to limit what they can talk about,” McPhee said. “I was not going to trade [top prospects] unless there was a superstar out there. And there wasn’t.”
The biggest prize was Dallas Stars center Brad Richards, who is having a fine season and won a Stanley Cup in 2004 with Tampa Bay. But he also is 32, an unrestricted free agent at season’s end and had missed several games with concussion symptoms right before the deadline. Giving up a key prospect for a rental is how teams get themselves in trouble.
So who are these prospects? Goalie Braden Holtby, forwards Cody Eakin and Evgeny Kuznetsov — an immensely skilled forward who helped Russia to the world juniors championship in January — and Russian defenseman Dmitry Orlov. Willing to take a chance on Russian youngsters while other NHL teams shy away, Washington grabbed Kuznetsov with the No. 26 pick in the 2010 draft. Orlov already has arrived at Hershey of the American Hockey League at age 19. He can’t play in the NHL this year, but it probably won’t be long before he joins the Caps’ young blueliners, Mike Green, Jeff Schultz, Karl Alzner and John Carlson.
“We got a report from someone that was at [Orlov’s AHL debut] who said Orlov’s first period the other night was the best first period he’s ever seen from a 19-year-old in the American Hockey League,” McPhee said. “So that was pretty encouraging.”
