Artificial Cheese

For all you ladies out there, imagine your excitement when you are offered a free makeover or a free visit to a salon.  I’m sure you females make those ‘wooo’ noises, and brush each others hair…or do whatever it is that you do when you get excited.  Sports fans are given two such days during the course of a year, trade deadlines and the draft.  These two days are full of player transactions that make and break teams.  A skilled general manager uses these days to exploit the needs of other teams to make their own teams better. 

The trade deadline for the NHL came and went this week, and I would be hard pressed to remember a more active trade deadline.  Active not only around the league, but for my hometown Philadelphia Flyers either.  The Flyers have had a very humbling, uncharacteristic year thus far.  It has 12-13 years since Philadelphia has seen such mediocity out of the Flyers; they sit at the bottom of the entire league in terms of overall record.

The reason for the failure is simple, the league has changed its rules to accomodate faster and thus younger teams, and the Flyers have always geared towards experience and size.  After the lockout, the Flyers were left with their pants down after putting together a team that they thought was the best in years.  Teams like the Buffalo Sabres suddenly became an elite team in the NHL simply because they adapted to the new rules faster than the rest of the league.

The trade deadline features two interesting dynamics: youth vs. experience, and contract sizes.  These are the grounds upon the shameless exploitation of team needs occurs.  Youth represents an investment in the future, while experience represents an investment in the present.  Teams that crave immediate success will trade their youth for experienced players.  Teams that are struggling will trade their highly paid players for anything promising.  The third case, into which the Flyers fall, is a team that trades its experience for youth in hopes of rebuilding their team.

Most teams have a hard time admitting that its time to rebuild, and for the first half of the season it appeared that the Flyers fell into that state of denial.  But it turns out that Flyers GM Paul Holmgren was just waiting for the right time to get the most bang for his buck.  Holmgren managed to carve out some delicious trades that braught the average age of the Flyers down a whopping 3 years, from 29 to 26.

The expected result was one of acceptance, where the fans and the players should have accepted their place at the bottom of the league and started to rebuild.  The actual impact was rejuvenation.  The young players braught an energy to the team that was bottled up while the veterans were on the ice. 

The timing of these trades was also great.  It is already clear that the Flyers are a better team after these trades, but they don’t have enough time to turn the season around.  This means that the Flyers are not jeopardizing their chances at the top draft pick.  All of these factors combined will result in a great future for the team.