Filipovic: Fantasy opportunities created at the NHL Trade Deadline

By the time all of the dust settled on Monday’s trade deadline, there was no shortage of player movement. Regardless of whether or not the event itself ultimately lives up to all of the speculation that precedes it, the lead-up to it is great because of how easy it is to get lost in the endless number of possibilities. But now that we have our answers to who is going where, the real fun is actually just beginning.

There’s a whole new set of questions to be answered over the course of the coming weeks.

With so many chess pieces sliding around the board it’ll be fascinating to see not only how the big names on the move do in their new homes, but also what happens in the suddenly vacant spots they left behind. There’s plenty of newfound opportunities out there for teams, players, and (oh, yeah) fantasy owners alike — and it’s up to us to figure who has the most to gain.

Let’s take a look at the biggest beneficiaries of the changing landscape.

The Predators power play

Nashville had to do something. For a team that once again has Stanley Cup aspirations, they’ve become far too predictable offensively. Their top line can still hold its own against anyone at five-on-five, but it’s a lot easier to match up against them when you can afford to funnel your entire defensive gameplan towards slowing them down because there isn’t much else that needs to be accounted for.

Because of that it was absolutely essential for them to go out and add at the deadline, and that’s exactly what David Poile did by trading for both Mikael Granlund and Wayne Simmonds in the final hour. Despite the telegraphed nature of their intentions, it helps that they didn’t have to pay a particularly egregious future price to fund the infusion of that secondary source of scoring into their lineup.

The most tangible impact those two additions will make will be on the power play, which is an area of the game where the Predators have mightily struggled this season. They currently sit at 31st in the league in both power-play efficiency and goals generated per hour. It’d be a bad look in a vacuum, but what makes it even worse is how big of an advantage some of their biggest competitors out West would have on them in a potential playoff series down the road. The Jets are fourth, the Sharks are fifth, and the Flames are eighth in those two metrics — that’s a massive edge during a time when the smallest of margins could make the difference between advancing and falling short of expectations.

Both guys should make an immediate impact, and in different ways. Granlund is one of the game’s most prolific passers, using the extra time and space the man advantage provides to feast on opposing penalty kills. This season he’s 22nd in power play helpers overall, with his 16 primary assists being good for seventh. On a per-minute basis, he’s 14th and fourth in those two categories. Putting the puck on his stick and letting him dictate the flow of the puck movement by operating from that traditional half wall office will do wonders for the Predators.

While he does it differently, Simmonds will similarly be immensely useful on the power play where the foot speed that’s been sapped from him is less of an issue. He’s one of the games true technicians around the net, working the angles in tight expertly to cause all sorts of distress for the other team. If there’s a particular skill you need from your net-front presence, he’s likely elite at it. There’s few better than him at tipping the puck, screening goalies, absorbing punishment from defensemen, and subtly creating passing lanes with his footwork. That’s a big reason why he’s scored so many power-play goals in his time with the Flyers, finishing every full season since 2011 with somewhere between 11 and 16 tallies there. In that time his 91 power play goals are tied for second best with Steven Stamkos, behind only Alex Ovechkin.

Simmonds remains a frightening buy this summer for any team considering signing him long-term given his age, style, and recent injury history regardless of how he does in a Predators uniform. But for a defined playoff sprint this season, seeing how much he has left in the tank is a worthwhile risk for Nashville to take given the potential reward.

With Granlund and Simmonds, what was league-worst power play suddenly has potential — and perhaps value for fantasy owners.

The risk versus reward of Brandon Montour

Regardless of how you feel about his production thus far or the price the Sabres paid to acquire him, there’s no disputing the fact that Brandon Montour is an incredibly tantalizing talent. You don’t have to be a trained hockey scout to immediately appreciate what he’s capable of physically. He’s a top flight skater, using that seemingly effortless extra gear he can hit to carry the puck up the ice with mesmerizing solo dashes. That facet of his game is reflected in his individual transition numbers, where he’s quite good.

While having a player that can enter and exit zones with controlled possession is certainly a useful asset, it’s also ultimately just one part of the game. There’s a lot more that goes into making an effective player, and if there’s other areas — such as their play without the puck — where they mightily struggle, then we need to consider the relative value of the two. If the overall results aren’t a net positive, then it’s fair to wonder whether being good at that one individual skill is actually that important in the first place or if the negative is just so detrimental that it drowns everything else out. That’s the question with Montour, whose underlying numbers in totality don’t seem to sync up with how good he looks like he should be.

The Sabres clearly seem to be betting on the talent prevailing in the light of a new environment. It’s hard to fault them for that logic, because the situation Montour is coming from in Anaheim was about as bad as it gets. First he was buried in Randy Carlyle’s soul-crushing system, before immediately finding himself in Bob Murray’s dog house following the change behind the bench. After hovering around the 23 minute mark on average for the majority of the season, Montour’s ice time dipped dramatically under Murray’s watch. In his final six games with the team, he played just 15:06, 16:52, 18:35, 17:04, 18:44, and 15:57.

It remains to be seen just how high the arrow will ascend for him in his new home, but it’s clear that it can only go up from here. If a better coaching staff can put him in a position to succeed by using him in a spot that covers his flaws and highlights his strengths, he could prove to be a savvy reclamation project for Buffalo. The fit is there on paper. There isn’t much in the way of road blocks for ice time at the position, where they’re still relatively bereft of impact talent even after adding Rasmus Dahlin.

The Sabres have some young talent up front, now they just need the horses to effectively get them the puck. Montour should assist with that, helping all be more productive.

The Golden Knights pushing their chips in

It was always going to be impossible for the Golden Knights to replicate the success that they enjoyed last season in Year 2, when they went 51-24-7 with a +44 goal differential and ran away with the Pacific Division. Because of that they haven’t really drawn the same sort of national attention, but the reality is that aside from some inevitable shooting regression they’ve been just as good if not better.

For them to add a player of Mark Stone’s caliber without subtracting anything from their main roster is quite the game changer. The second it became obvious that Artemi Panarin wasn’t going anywhere, Stone immediately became the best player available on the open market. And yet while he’s obviously a tremendous player in his own right, just as crucially now he gives the team a number of options to get creative with how they mix and match their forwards moving forward.

A big part of what made the Knights so effective last season was their ability to attack in relentless waves, not giving the opposition time to relax and take shifts off. They’ve clearly had a tougher go of accomplishing that this season, mostly because the third line has been a revolving door of largely ineffective combinations regardless of what Gerard Gallant has tried. Now they’ve got enough wingers to spread around between the three lines, regardless of the specifics. Whether it’s Reilly Smith or Alex Tuch that ultimately gets bumped down to the third line, either one of them represents a major upgrade for Cody Eakin to play off of. It sounds like they’ll start off putting Stone next to Stastny, which could be a lethal combination given Stone’s finishing ability — he’s shooting 19.3% this year and has never dipped below 15.2% in a full season — and Stastny’s natural playmaking ability.

Locked into the third seed in the Pacific Division already, they’re eyeing an unenviable road map come the postseason. To keep advancing, they’ll like need to beat both the Sharks and the Flames, before facing whoever comes out of the Jets and Predators rematch. Considering that there’s an argument to be made that those are the best teams in the conference in some order, the idea that the Knights would be able to run the gauntlet seems rather ambitious. That’s why it was of utmost importance for them to make sure that Mark Stone is around for not only the remainder of this season, but many years to come.

The trickle-down effect for sellers

Once the deadline passes and the rebuilding teams have finally sold off their movable older pieces of note, we typically tend to forget about them because we immediately shift our attention to the playoff picture.

There’s still some value in circling back to those bad teams not going anywhere this season even after they’re out of the daily news cycle, because they present some situations worth monitoring in the final six weeks of the season. Once the veteran players have been moved out, that tends to open the door for additional playing time and responsibility for younger replacements — something fantasy owners should keep tabs on. For teams that aren’t making the playoffs, it behooves them to make the most of this time by giving their prospects an extended look. Now that wins and losses don’t ultimately matter for them, the primary mandate should be to see exactly what they have in their young player and determine whether they’ll factor into their future plans.

That’s especially true for the Senators and Rangers, the two of whom represented the league’s biggest sellers in terms of both quality and quantity this past week. For the latter, there have been plenty of top-six minutes suddenly opened up now that Mats Zuccarello and Kevin Hayes are no longer eating them up.

At the moment, David Quinn have Jimmy Vesey riding shotgun with the dynamic duo of Zibanejad and Kreider on the top line. Pretty much anyone that plays with the two of them will be productive offensively by sheer osmosis alone, and it’s no coincidence that Vesey has a pair of multi-point efforts in his last two games. (Note: He’s owned in just 4% percent of Yahoo fantasy leagues).

From a bigger picture perspective, I’d like to see Pavel Buchnevich get a real audition there. His results have been spotty early in his career, but the talent is undeniable, as are the trends. While he has yet to show that he can carry his own line, he’s typically thrived whenever he’s gotten to share the ice with other skilled players. In the 326 minutes that he’s played with both Zibanejad and Kreider, the trio has dominated — they boast a 56% shot share and control 59.6% of the high danger attempts taken. It’s been frustrating watching Buchnevich fail to secure his coach’s trust for any extended period of time in his three years with the Rangers, but there’s still time for it to happen for him in New York. They just need to believe in the talent, and position him to succeed with a spot in the lineup that allows him to blossom into the player he keeps showing tantalizing flashes of.

As for the Senators, they’ve basically had their forward group stripped clean in the past couple of days. They just lost their three highest-usage players up front, which means that while they might not have much, one thing they certainly do have is opportunity to come in and play for young players. Players like Brady Tkachuk and Colin White are obvious ice time beneficiaries, but they were already firmly entrenched in the Senators top-six anyways. Considering how little competition there is above them in the depth chart, Anthony Duclair and Rudolfs Balcers could be candidates for more work than they’ll know what to do with. The big name to watch is Drake Batherson, whose 49 points in 41 AHL games as a 20-year old are awfully encouraging.

One random name to keep an eye on: Filip Hronek. With Nicklas Jensen out of the picture, there’s some extra minutes on the Red Wings blueline that are up for grabs. It doesn’t make sense for Detroit to give those opportunities to the likes of Niklas Kronwall and Mike Green, considering that they’ll be 38- and 34-years-old respectively by the start of next season.

It’s tough to properly evaluate him at this level with only 28 games of NHL experience to his name, but he’s done two things consistently at the lower levels that suggest promising things in the future: he’s been ahead of the game for his age and he’s produced offensively. After playing in the pro Czech league as an 18-year old in his draft season, he came to North America and immediately generated north over a point per game in the OHL. Last season as a 20-year old he was 7th in scoring against defenseman in the AHL, and has 23 points in 28 games with Grand Rapids during the times he’s been down there this year.

It’s tough for any young defenseman to consistently eat big minutes at this level, but the Red Wings can afford to live with any mistakes he makes right now. At worst, he’s already more than capable of quarterbacking their top power-play unit.