1. Phillip Danault
There are good trades and then there are flat out thefts of teams desperate to win. In 2016, Price was hurt again so the Canadiens were definitely sellers again. The Chicago Blackhawks had won every other Stanley Cup for the previous decade it seemed so they were definitely buyers again.
I shouldn’t say they were desperate to win. But they were obviously trying everything they could do to keep their Cup window open. The Blackhawks constantly lost great depth players every year due to the salary cap and the 2015-16 team was no different.
The Hawks won their third Stanley Cup in six years in 2015, but lost Kris Versteeg, Brad Richards and Patrick Sharp because they simply could not afford to keep them. So they needed to add more depth forwards to try and go on a run again in 2016.
They used some prime assets to acquire Andrew Ladd from the Winnipeg Jets, but also gave up some future assets to acquire depth pieces from the Canadiens. The Hawks gave up Phillip Danault who was their first round pick in 2011 and a second round pick in 2018 for Dale Weise and Tomas Fleischmann.
Fleischmann had 20 points in 57 games before the trade and Weise had 26 points in 56 games. Weise scored no goals and one assist in 15 games with the Blackhawks following the trade and Fleischmann had four goals and one assist in 19 games. Both were unrestricted free agents following the season and did not re-sign with the Blackhawks.
Danault has blossomed into a fantastic two-way center who was on the Selke ballot last season and scored 53 points. The second round pick the Habs picked up in the deal was used to select Alexander Romanov who just turned 20 years old and is wrapping up his second full season in the KHL.
You can’t do much better than that on deadline day. But it does show that it takes patience with these types of trades. We didn’t know what Danault would become or who the second round pick would be at the time of the deal. We know now and we know it was grand larceny by Bergevin.