Sens at Land's End

Pop quiz, hotshot. The NHL team you own has 47 forwards under contract and only three defencemen. The normal roster for an NHL team is 13 forwards, seven defencemen, and two goaltenders. You are obviously in desperate need of defencemen. What do you do? What. Do. You. Do?

If you are the Tampa Bay Lightning, you trade two of your defencemen (namely, Filip Kuba and Alexandre Picard) to the Senators to get one defenceman (Andrej Meszaros) back. That seems logical. If you failed grade 1 math.

The Lightning seem to be careening around with no particular destination or plan guiding them at the moment, just the whim of a madman telling them they’ve got to keep going or they’ll die. The result is that there is simply no place for logic in Tampa Bay right now. In this situation, logic is the lady who tried to get off the bus when they brought out the stretcher for the driver who’d been shot. You remember what happened to her.

But I am feeling pretty okay about the death of logic at the moment, since it seems to be benefiting the Sens. In this case, we are getting more bodies by spending less money and losing a player who was kinda starting to bring back some unpleasant Yashin-esque memories with this whole cash grab thing he had going on. Also coming to the Sens in the deal is a first round pick, formerly San Jose’s. I’m got a feeling the Sharks may not do very well this year, so who knows? That could turn out to be a reasonably high pick.

TSN is reporting that Meszaros will likely sign a six-year deal with the Lightning, worth $4 million per year.

This has been a pretty interesting story over the last couple of days. First, there was Bryan Murray’s press conference, at which he told reporters that the talks with Meszaros were still going nowhere. A few hours later came a Hockey News story that Meszaros had signed an offer sheet with an unnamed team, and then today we started to hear this talk about Tampa, and the offer sheet that couldn’t exist due to Tampa’s third round pick already having gone to Pittsburgh, and Ray Shero’s apparent unwillingness to be even remotely involved with an RFA offer sheet. Finally, we get this trade.

Personally, I’m very happy to see that something has finally happened with Meszaros. This whole stalemate situation was getting old, and I think it was preventing BM the GM from putting the finishing touches on the roster for this season. Now, with the additions of Kuba and Picard (a Gatineau native), the defence suddenly looks much deeper. The two of them combined make a little less than Meszaros is reportedly getting from the Lightning, which makes the cap situation look a whole lot brighter. I can’t say that I know a whole lot about either Kuba or Picard, but from the sounds of it Kuba has fairly decent offensive skills. He’s also really big. Picard, meanwhile, is only 23 years old (a few months older than Meszaros), has just over a season’s worth of NHL experience, and scored 38 points in 53 games with the Flyers’ AHL team last season. Whether he can produce in the NHL is definitely a question, but it’s also far from certain that Meszaros is ever going to live up to the promise he showed as a rookie and I would not have wanted to see the Sens pay him $4 million per year while they waited to find out.

The question that pops into my mind now that this is done is: are there any top six forwards left? Is there anyone alive out there? Hello? Maybe if Mats Sundin would just make up his flippin’ mind already, some of the other NHL pieces would fall into place.