Burnside: Examining The Lead-Up To The Deadline For The Canes

RALEIGH, NC. -At 2:30 p.m. Monday Carolina Hurricanes President & General Manager Don Waddell turned to the group gathered in the team's fourth-floor trade deadline war room at PNC Arena and said he'd never had a trade deadline pass when he wasn't either a buyer or a seller. But this 2022 trade deadline looked like it would be the first time.
28 minutes later, with the 3 p.m. ET cut-off to make trades looming, Waddell and his staff were electronically filing the necessary paperwork to
add versatile, skilled winger Max Domi to the Hurricanes' roster
from the Columbus Blue Jackets.

The deal cost the Hurricanes mid-range prospect Aidan Hreschuk, who just completed his first year at Boston College after being selected by Carolina 94th overall in 2021, and the contract of Egor Korshkov, who is currently playing in Russia. To make it all work, the trade also required the involvement of the Florida Panthers, who retained 25% of Domi's $5.3-million cap hit to keep the Hurricanes cap compliant. The Cats recieved a sixth round pick from Columbus and Korshkov from the Canes for their aid.
In addition to Florida's assistance, Columbus also retained 50% of Domi's salary.
"It was a complicated deal," Waddell said late Monday afternoon. "We had to do some maneuvering there and all that takes time. Do you want it always to go down at two minutes to three? No it adds a little more stress to your life. But it's the way a lot of these deals happen."
When the deal was filed NHL officials told Waddell the Domi deal was one of 33 waiting to be okayed by the NHL.
"Deadlines are interesting," the veteran GM added. "Most of the heavy action comes near the deadline when people are forced to make a decision. Our business is no different."
Is Domi, the 12th overall pick from the 2013 draft who will become an unrestricted free agent this summer, the missing piece to the Carolina Hurricanes' Stanley Cup puzzle?
Oh that it were all that simple.
But building a champion is never simple and the National Hockey League trade deadline is more often than not a time of false hope and great regret even though the buzz and emotion that surrounds the trade period might lead us to believe otherwise.
And maybe it's worthwhile to try and understand the thought process that led the Hurricanes to this last-minute deal especially within the context of a trade deadline period that saw most of the team's competition in the talent-laden Eastern Conference make significant additions prior to Monday afternoon.
So let's start here, In the team offices at PNC Arena on Saturday morning.
It's quiet in the fourth floor offices just as it has been quiet for the most part around the NHL.
Waddell knows that's about to change.
"Let's face it, when you're in the hockey business it's a fun time," Waddell said. "I also say the trade deadline day is the most dangerous day in hockey. Because at the end of the day only one team's going to win. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to help your team if you can, but there's a lot of movement of assets going around that for some people it's not going to quite work out for. So that's why you want to be mindful about all those things. But no, it's a fun time."
Waddell, a veteran of many deadline wars during his career, turned out to be prophetic. A few hours later the Boston Bruins, a potential first-round matchup for the first-place Hurricanes, added defenseman Hampus Lindholm one of the top rental players on the marketplace. Minutes later it was announced longtime Philadelphia captain Claude Giroux, fresh from his 1,000th-game celebration in Philadelphia, was headed to Florida where he joins former Montreal defenseman Ben Chiarot on a Panther team as good as its ever been in South Florida.
A day earlier forward Brandon Hagel was acquired by Tampa as the Lightning pursue a rare third straight Stanley Cup. By the end of the day Monday the Lightning added Nick Paul from Ottawa while the New York Rangers, coming off a 2-0 win over Carolina on Sunday night, had added depth defenseman Justin Braun and key depth forwards Andrew Copp and Tyler Motte to go with another deadline period addition, Frank Vatrano, who happened to score the empty-net goal against Carolina.
What happens in Florida and Tampa and Boston and in New York is of interest, of course, but what happens in Florida and Tampa and Boston and New York cannot dictate how the Hurricanes prepared for and executed their own deadline behavior.
"I think you're aware of everything that happens around the league but you can't be reactionary to what other teams are doing. I just don't believe in that," Waddell said. "Everybody's at a different point in their franchise. Obviously Tampa's won back to back Cups. They want to go for a third. If you're in that position you'd think differently than we think here."

On our way up to the fourth floor we ran into Mike Futa, who joined the organization as a Senior Consultant to the General Manager after playing a significant role in the building of two Stanley Cup championship teams in Los Angeles in 2012 and 2014. For a time Saturday he is the only occupant in the team's 'war room', which is an office with special whiteboard walls on which are the names of teams and below those team names players who may be available and/or may be of interest to the Hurricanes.
There are plenty of smudges from names being added and then erased.
There are cameras on video monitors that will allow owner Tom Dundon to take part in the discussions remotely prior to Monday's deadline. The fact that Dundon wasn't planning on being in town for the deadline is one of many indicators of how the Hurricanes were preparing for the deadline - i.e. not likely to be involved in any kind of blockbuster deal. Dundon's absence is also a perfect illustration of the different reality in which the Hurricanes find themselves since the change in ownership.
After missing the playoffs for a decade and being a perennial seller at the trade deadline the Hurricanes have, under Dundon, become a cap team. In the off-season they created a social media storm in making an offer sheet to emerging two-way forward Jesperi Kotkaniemi whose
eight-year contract extension with the Hurricanes was announced
shortly after the trade deadline passed.
The move to add Kotkaniemi, the third overall pick in 2018, cost the Hurricanes a first and a third-round pick in this summer's draft. And before Monday's deadline Waddell had made it clear he was not interested in parting with the team's 2023 first-round pick at least not for a straight rental, that is, a player on an expiring contract.
That combined with the limited cap space, and the fact the Hurricanes hit the deadline as the first place team in the Metropolitan Division with the third-best winning percentage in the NHL behind Colorado and Florida, suggested that Monday was going to be a quiet day.
"And so as we approach the deadline we don't have any glaring holes," Waddell said. "And we also talked to Rod a lot about this. We like everybody on our team. And so we have a little bit of cap space but not a lot. The way you create cap space you can trade somebody off your team or you can try to broker some deals (with third teams willing to take cap space) but it all costs assets. And since we gave up our first and third this year we just feel like our team's in a good position right now. There's that old phrase about mortgaging the future. We still have to keep the eye on the future because the big thing is in a salary cap world we know that we're going to need young players coming. Not everybody can be bought through free agency. We want to retain our good players. There's a cost of doing business so we've got to make sure we've got a pipeline coming so that's why our picks and prospects are so important for our future."
It's a fascinating time in this team's history and pull back the lens a bit, and it's a fascinating time in the league as a whole.
With the COVID-19 epidemic creating a flat cap situation for the next two or three years pending how quickly the economics can be restored it's critical to have homegrown talent on your NHL roster and in your pipeline. And yet we've seen teams like Tampa over the past two seasons send out prime assets to add at the deadline - Blake Coleman and Barclay Goodrow at last year's deal followed up by the addition of Hagel and Nick Paul this year. Other teams have followed suit.
The Hurricanes' world view is different though.
Maybe that comes from just now emerging from a decade of doldrums. Even though this team is a legitimate Stanley Cup contender in 2022 there will always be a wary eye kept on the team's future.
"I've got a coach that loves our team and loves our guys here and wants to try and make it work with what we've got going," Waddell said. "It doesn't mean we can't maybe add some kind of depth or something like that just for support so our thinking is not going all-in. The way your franchise is set up right now with our younger players if we do this right we should be competitive, it doesn't mean you're going to win it, but we should be competitive for the next six seven years and maybe longer."
It's a comfortable place to be in after many years of discomfort.
"We don't even talk about making the playoffs anymore. Which is a nice thing actually you know," Waddell said. "You think about how you take that next step and that's obviously winning a championship. You always want to win today but we also think that we have a setup that we should be able to compete for the Cup for many, many years."
In the hours that passed leading up to the last-minute dash to add the 27-year-old Domi, Waddell was in constant conversation with his scouting and hockey operations staff just as he was in almost constant conversation with his counterparts around the NHL.
The group discussed internally where their focus should be heading into Monday and while weeks ago it might have been in adding some defensive depth, the feeling was the team's depth both at the NHL level, and with their American Hockey League affiliate in Chicago, there weren't options that made the team better especially weighed against the cost of assets to make such moves.
The focus then became adding some offensive help with a player that could play in the top nine.
But it's not just about figuring whether a player like Domi could fit both in terms of the salary cap and the assets it would cost to acquire him but there are very specific players who fit the Hurricanes model.
"Absolutely. One question we always ask, will he play our style? Can he play our style?" Waddell said. "There are some really good players out there but that maybe aren't a fit for our very aggressive style. So, let's face it I'm not going to make a trade without Rod saying he's going to fit into our lineup, fit into our team, the whole thing."
That's why Brind'Amour and his coaching staff were part of discussions on Monday leading up to the Domi deal. No sense acquiring a player that won't fit, although after watching Brind'Amour for the past four seasons Waddell and his staff, which includes Futa, assistant GMs Darren Yorke, Eric Tulsky, Director of Hockey Operations Aaron Schwartz and former Hurricanes and three-time Stanley Cup winner Justin Williams, they know intrinsically what qualities Brind'Amour demands from his players.
"We've got to do our homework make sure we check all the boxes about team player and all that so we can do all that stuff and then if we get to a point where it makes sense then check with Rod and make sure it's somebody (that fits)," Waddell said. "We have a pretty good idea of the guys that are going to fit in with Rod."
As much as all of this is a collaborative effort at the end of the day, it's Waddell who has the final say and on Monday, of course, that final say was yes to Domi, but with precious little time to spare.
Waddell recalled a conversation at the trade deadline many years ago when he was the GM of the Atlanta Thrashers. Longtime hockey executive Jack Ferreira was part of the Thrashers' hockey ops department and at the time the group was discussing trading popular forward Donald Audette.
"We walked back to my office and he said 'Don I'm going to tell you, I know you want to listen to all your scouts but at 3:05 they're all a plane back to their homes. You're the one that's got to live with this, with how you deal with it. You have to make sure you have that last vote and do what your gut tells you to do.'"
"I stuck with that for a long time," Waddell said. "Everybody's got a say in the process. That's the way we operate here. But at the end of the day we've got to make sure we do the best thing for our franchise. Today and tomorrow."
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