Greg WyshynskiMar 11, 2026, 07:30 AM ETCloseGreg Wyshynski is ESPN’s senior NHL writer.Follow on XMultiple Authors
play0:58Miro Heiskanen glides the OT winner in for the StarsMiro Heiskanen makes the most of an assist from Matt Duchene with an overtime goal.
Miro Heiskanen glides the OT winner in for the StarsMiro Heiskanen makes the most of an assist from Matt Duchene with an overtime goal.
play0:44Conor Garland scores goal for Blue JacketsConor Garland nets goal for Blue Jackets
play0:42Colton Parayko scores goal vs. PredatorsColton Parayko scores goal vs. Predators
Getting Corey Perry means the Lightning are winning the East
Avalanche take down the Wild in a shootout (1:08)Avalanche take down the Wild in a shootout (1:08)
We had fascinating rumors, players blocking trades, some surprising names on the move — and some names that surprisingly didn’t move, despite expectations.
Something else the deadline had: overreactions, to the trades that were made, the teams that stayed on the sideline and whether the league’s new salary cap rules ruined our annual chaos.
Here are 10 overreactions to the 2026 NHL trade deadline that we judge to be absolutely reasonable or totally misguided.
The Colorado Avalanche entered the trade deadline in the same spot they were in back in October: first overall in the Central Division, Western Conference and the NHL overall. But GM Chris MacFarland is never one to be comfortable on the throne. He’s one of the most aggressive managers in the league — please recall him blowing up his goaltending tandem and trading away Mikko Rantanen last season. It wasn’t a matter of if he’d do something at the deadline, but what he’d do.
The Avalanche are the NHL’s best offensive team (3.79 goals per game) and defensive team (2.42 goals against per game) and have managed to outpace the Dallas Stars and Minnesota Wild in the league’s toughest division. But as MacFarland’s actions show, there’s always room for improvement — and the Avalanche are a better team now than they were before the deadline.
Kulak, meanwhile, is an ideal third-pairing defenseman who can move up the lineup. He showed his value during two long playoff runs with the Oilers over the past two seasons.
I picked the Avalanche to win the Stanley Cup before the season. They’ve given me no reason to rethink that as of yet; and at the trade deadline, they might have underscored my confidence in that prediction.
The Stars and Wild know what’s ahead of them. According to Money Puck, there’s a 76% chance the Stars finish in second place and an 81% chance the Wild finish third in the Central. Thanks to an NHL playoff format that has three of the league’s top four teams meeting before the conference finals, Dallas and Minnesota are likely going to meet in the first round before the winner faces the Avalanche (barring a truly shocking wild-card upset of Colorado).
One would assume these teams would seek blockbuster upgrades before the deadline to win their playoff series and then potentially take down the Avs. Instead, there were minor positional upgrades, which isn’t nearly enough.
The Stars have lost in three straight conference finals, which is to say they’ve made three consecutive conference finals, too. They’re the second-best team in the NHL behind the Avalanche and have proved it in the standings for much of this season. With that established, I didn’t hate their deadline.
The biggest name, both in prestige and measured height, was defenseman Tyler Myers of the Vancouver Canucks. Cost of acquisition was a real key here: a second- and a fourth-round pick, with the Canucks retaining 50% of Myers’ contract, which runs through next season. He’ll be cast correctly in Dallas as a third-pairing defenseman and should find his game again away from the mess that is Vancouver.
He’s not as good as Chris Tanev but is better than Cody Ceci, if we’re comparing him to recent Dallas deadline adds. Would Dallas be better with Rasmus Ristolainen on the right side? Of course, but combine cost and cap hit — keeping in mind there’s a Jason Robertson extension on the horizon — and adding Myers is fine. Michael Bunting, acquired from Nashville for a third-rounder, is there to help offset the loss of Tyler Seguin for the season. Hopefully a change in scenery does him good.
Miro Heiskanen glides the OT winner in for the Stars
Miro Heiskanen makes the most of an assist from Matt Duchene with an overtime goal.
So, Dallas’ deadline was acceptable, as there is proof of concept that the Stars can be a successful postseason team. The Wild, however, needed to do more than what GM Bill Guerin accomplished before last Friday.
The Wild made three deadline-day additions, bringing in defenseman Jeff Petry, winger Bobby Brink, and most notably, left wing Nick Foligno to join his brother Marcus. (In one of the deadline’s unintentionally funniest moments, Guerin said the first thing he told Minnesota native Brink was that “this is not a family reunion” on the same day he united the Folignos.)
From a cost of acquisition standpoint, it was more good than bad: The Wild sent away two sets of future considerations, a conditional seventh-round pick and defenseman David Jiricek, who hadn’t found his game in back of a logjam on the Minnesota defense. But the Wild anted up a second-rounder to Nashville for fourth-line center Michael McCarron, and that’s an overpayment.
The biggest problem is that McCarron was the best center they acquired at the deadline. As stated before, Colorado has the best center depth in the league. Dallas has players such as Wyatt Johnston, Matt Duchene, Roope Hintz and Radek Faksa that it can put in the middle.
Are Ryan Hartman, Joel Eriksson Ek, Danila Yurov and McCarron enough to win the West? Maybe I’m just still working through the shock of Vincent Trocheck of the Rangers not ending up with his Team USA general manager at the deadline, but this doesn’t seem like a championship group in the middle of a very good lineup otherwise.
In one of the deadline’s true overpayments, the Lightning traded a second-round pick in 2028 to the Los Angeles Kings for 40-year-old Corey Perry on the same day the Kings acquired Scott Laughton from Toronto for a conditional third.
But hey, who cares how much it cost, because the Bolts now have Corey Perry, which means they’re going to play for the Stanley Cup!
Look, who are we to argue with the Hockey Gods? They have deemed that if a team has Corey Perry on its roster, it will play for the Stanley Cup.
In five of the past six seasons, Perry has played for the Cup with Dallas (2020), Montreal (2021), Tampa Bay (2022) and then twice with Edmonton (2024, 2025). The only time he didn’t play for the Cup was in 2023, when the Hockey Gods were so preoccupied with how to maximize the eventual disappointment of Maple Leafs fans that they allowed Perry’s Lightning to lose to Toronto in the first round.
Based on the available evidence, the Lightning will win the Eastern Conference this season … before losing in the Stanley Cup Final, which is something Corey Perry has also done in five of the past six seasons.
According to Money Puck, the Florida Panthers have a 1.5% chance of making the Stanley Cup playoffs this season. Which means the team that has marauded through the East for the past three postseasons will be coping at the Elbo Room rather than celebrating, leaving the conference wide open for another contender.
And yet … where were the big moves from those contenders? Perry was the only addition for the Lightning. Carolina picked up Flyers bruiser Nicolas Deslauriers … and that was it, leading to head coach Rod Brind’Amour’s newly famous lament that, “I know there’s a lot of disappointment, I’m going to be honest … The players were hoping to see us make a splash. It’s tough.”
Montreal literally did nothing. Boston did close to that by trading a sixth-rounder to Vancouver for Lukas Reichel and swapping some AHL players. Pittsburgh added forward Elmer Soderblom and defenseman Samuel Girard, but that’s not exactly jamming open the window to win for Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin.
The only two teams to make significant moves that are in current playoff positions were Detroit (trading for Justin Faulk and David Perron, fantastic adds if this were 2020) and the New York Islanders, who took on the full freight of 34-year-old Brayden Schenn’s contract ($6.5 million average annual value) through 2027-28.
I didn’t mention Buffalo yet, and that’s because it’s illustrative of the Eastern Conference contenders’ deadline.
The Sabres took a huge swing at St. Louis star Robert Thomas, but talks never got as far as reported, as Thomas wasn’t asked to waive his trade protection. Talks did get that far with a bid for Blues defenseman Colton Parayko, but he declined to waive. So, the Sabres settled for Logan Stanley and Luke Schenn of the Winnipeg Jets, two depth defensemen.
GM Jarmo Kekalainen went for it. Due to mitigating circumstances — the price to add Thomas, Parayko’s trade protection — the Sabres fell short. It wasn’t for a lack of trying. Ditto Canadiens GM Kent Hughes, who told reporters that a significant deal he was chasing didn’t get over the finish line on Friday.
That’s probably the case for a number of the teams mentioned above. Is there anything in Carolina GM Eric Tulsky’s history that would indicate the Hurricanes wanted to stop at acquiring a face-puncher from Philadelphia? Of course not. The cost to acquire players was high. The market was unfavorable. Big swings were hard to make.
Which is to say that outside of two teams — three, if you want to rope in the Columbus Blue Jackets and their Conor Garland trade — the East contenders didn’t do much to separate themselves from the pack. But there are reasons for that.
Conor Garland scores goal for Blue JacketsConor Garland nets goal for Blue Jackets
The Predators shipped out three depth forwards (Bunting, McCarron and Cole Smith) and defenseman Blankenberg. All the big names remained in Nashville, during a trade deadline where the returns were robust.