NHL Rumors: Expect Bigger Trades To Come in 2024

Expect Bigger Trades To Come When Calendar Flips To 2024

Dave Pagnotta of The Fourth Period joined Steve Kouleas and Luke Gazdic on Sirius XM NHL Network Radio Power Play show on Monday and when asked about when potential trades could happen, he stated the bigger names will probably wait until 2024.

** NHLRumors.com Transcription

Steve Kouleas: “Dave Pagnotta, Editor in Chief of the Fourth Period, so we’re in December, a lot of chatter, and there have been some trades, obviously (Nikita) Zadorov being the biggest one (Anthony) Beauvillier to clear up that cap space. Do you think once we get to January, will the math work? When do you think the popcorn will start popping, and some of the pretenders will trade and the contenders will start to stack?”

Dave Pagnotta: “Well, we’ll see kind of, over the next week or so. The holiday freeze kicks in on the 20th so there’s still certainly some time to potentially get something going now.

Whether it is Detroit’s escalated talks involving (Jonatan) Berggren, which I believe is a bit of a little larger scale. Whether they get something going or St. Louis with Jakub Vrana because they seem to be inching closer to make something happen there. Or one of the guys in Calgary. Although it sounds like Calgary is kind of slow playing, slow cooking the situation right now because of where they’re at. Maybe putting a little bit of pressure on some teams to perhaps Ante up a little bit more later on.

I think the bigger moves Kools is that we’ll see is probably you know, once we hit the New Year to get their calendar to flip the 24 and that’s probably when we’ll start to see some of the more you know, kind of larger type of type of players going. We’ve seen a couple of things but obviously with Zadorov and a couple others, but it sounds like the bigger ones might be later on because again, and I feel like a broken record every time I gotta mention this but frickin salary cap gets in the way of some things planned.

So we got to wait, they got to be creative and there has to be a little bit more maneuverability financially for some of these teams to take action even though we do know San Jose, Anaheim, Montreal, Philadelphia, even Calgary to a certain extent, Chicago to a certain extent willing to take on contracts to be a third party to facilitate deals, not necessarily retain on a contract but unless it’s expiring, but take on an actual contract as well.

So I think we’ll start to hear more in the New Year on the bigger deals with some fine tuning guys, I can certainly see happen between now and either right before the 20th which is when the holiday freeze kicks in right at midnight, or, you know right in those last few days of the month because it lifts on the 28th at midnight as well. Eastern.

We can see perhaps some movement there too, on some of the strategic type of depth type of moves.”