NHL Rumors: Whether or not to allow a team to talk to a pending UFA before making an acquisition

Teams might think twice about letting a potential trade partner with a pending UFA talk about an extension

Sportsnet: Elliotte Friedman on 32 thoughts: The Podcast – Canada Can’t Turn Down Connor Bedard’s episode on the idea of ​​not allowing teams to talk to a player about an extension before trading for them.

** NHLRumors.com transcription

Kyle Bukauskas: “And I thought the point you made on the radio as well, and this doesn’t specifically pertain to one team or one player. But just that whole idea, if you’re trading for someone on an expiring deal, that you might consider signing an extension, the workflow, I think we’re going through all of this, in terms of, let’s make a deal first before you can talk to my guy if you want to sign him to a new contract, rather than the other way around. The point you made was an interesting one period.

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Friedman: “Well, so if anyone wasn’t listening to me on the radio Thursday, shame on you if you weren’t. I remember talking to Craig Conroy after they did the Noah Hanifin deal with Vegas. And Craig Conroy said afterward that that’s probably not the process he would want to do again. Because they gave Vegas the go-ahead, and even though they didn’t sign the extension as part of the deal, it didn’t take long for it to happen after that.

So you can basically look at this and say, Vegas made that deal pretty much knowing what it would take to sign Hanifin at the ballpark, and Hanifin’s reps, Pat Brisson, knew what Vegas wanted to do.

And when Vegas made that deal, I think the people around, I remember the people around it, were like, this is going to happen. Like there’s going to be an expansion here, and in the end there was.

And I remember Craig Conroy talking about it later, and he said if he was in that situation again, he would change it next time. And he would first make the trade he was happy with, and then say, ‘Okay, do you want to talk to this player about an extension? You have that, you have that power, you have that ability. But this, if you make an extension, this is the deal we agree to. It’s done.’

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And actually a GM called me after hearing that segment, and he said that’s a lesson that I think a lot of us learned. That sometimes you think it’s better, oh yeah, okay, you can do it, you sign an extension with that team, and then we make a trade, and you basically lose the power. Then the team can say, “Hey, we have an extension here. Where else are you going to trade them to?

And so teams don’t like it. Now they’re turning it around. They do it the other way around.”

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