Salvas: My 10-Team No-Trade List

Ottawa's screwup proves costly and made me think where I wouldn't want to play and live.

Courtesy of CBC

The news out of Ottawa this week was crazy. It makes you realize how lucky we are as Avalanche fans to have competent leadership at the top; a front office that makes astute trades and is able to sign some of the league’s best players on contracts that don’t cripple the foundation of a deep team.

What we saw in Ottawa was a lapse in judgment… duty… due diligence. One or all of those. And in return, the team was docked a first rounder. 

It still seems odd that a situation punishes — and rightly so — one team for the failed trade between two others. Ottawa’s mismanagement of the initial trade sending Evgenii Dadonov to Vegas while failing to inform the Golden Knights of his limited no-trade clause the Senators had negotiated into his contract led to a whole mess for the Knights and Ducks a year later. And initially it made both of those teams and the league look bad for its failure to have a centralized location for player no-move clauses to be located. The reality was that the whole situation’s fault lay in Canada’s capital city.

That’s a story that any NHL fan following the league right now knows the details to. Of course there are things below the surface that came to light in Ottawa’s press conference Wednesday afternoon in which new owner Michael Andlauer pined that the club under his guidance should not be held responsible for the faults committed during the previous ownership. A funny statement at its heart, it’s made even funnier by the fact that the man responsible for the predicament was not the previous owner, but the team’s current GM… well current until the league’s punishment was handed down.

I understand his reasoning, though. He feels like issues were downplayed during the purchasing period that led to him paying more money for the club that he would have had he known what was coming from the league. It’s all very complicated, and yet, so simple. 

Anyway, the whole situation got me thinking about no-movement clauses and a player’s ability to limit who his current team could or could not trade him to. I began to think about what 10 teams I would pick to add to my list and why.

I decided to make my own list that would include the 10 teams I could have on my own no-trade list if I were a player with the ability to do so. I wanted to make a list that would include teams for geographical reasons, while also taking into account what a franchise was like right now, whether it was in a rebuild or if the environment felt toxic.