Spector on Canucks: Time to trade Schneider
Posted February 1, 2012 3:30 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Every general manager will tell you the same thing: The most trying element in running a National Hockey League team is patience. Waiting for players to develop, for slumps to end, for chemistry to take hold.
For Canucks GM Mike Gillis, who has unswervingly allowed the soup to simmer to near perfection in Vancouver, the most difficult moment has arrived: After all that patient building, and a trip as far as you can go without ordering the rings a year ago, the time for patient building has ended in Vancouver.
It is time to gather all the assets and get them on the ice. It is time to trade goaltender Cory Schneider.
The Canucks will be an annual Cup contender for a few years yet, but will they ever be more ready to win the Stanley Cup than they are today? They are experienced, their leaders are in their prime, and as we saw with Christian Ehrhoff, pieces of this lineup are more likely to break off as time passes.
So why short yourself by having your most valuable trade asset sitting on the bench wearing a ball cap this spring, rather than patrolling Ryan Kesler’s wing, at 6-foot-3 and 220 pounds?
We’re not saying “Trade Schneider at all costs.” We are saying, shop him hard, and if you can get what the Canucks so dearly need — a second line winger with size, experience, grit and skill — then make the trade.
Could you get Rick Nash out of Columbus for a package including Schneider? Could you pry an Andrew Ladd from Winnipeg, where Schneider starred for the Manitoba Moose? A Kyle Okposo from the Isles, who need goaltending? Ryan Malone and a defenceman from Tampa?
You’ll only know if you investigate, and we have no doubt Gillis is doing just that. But as former Dallas Stars personnel man Craig Button said Wednesday, “The Vancouver Canucks have to be bold. They have to be real bold here.”
When Button was in Dallas, the Stars dealt a junior-aged Jarome Iginla for Calgary Flames captain Joe Nieuwendyk. “Detroit had (centres) Steve Yzerman and Sergei Fedorov, and Colorado had Joe Sakic and Peter Forsberg,” Button said. The Stars brass knew they required a second centre to go along with Mike Modano, and Nieuwendyk would go on to win the Conn Smythe when the Stars won their lone Stanley Cup in 1999.
It is, of course, one more Stanley Cup than the Canucks have won.
“We knew we were giving up a really good young player in Iginla. This wasn’t just a prospect,” Button said. “The telling point was, where would that opportunity come again, to get that type of a centreman?”
If Gillis does not dig hard into the trade market, how will he ever know what Schneider could reap?
Tell us again why Vancouver needs hockey’s best backup? They have the Northwest Division wrapped up on Feb. 1, and could certainly win a few games against inferior opponents with Chicago Wolves starter Eddie Lack in goal.
And forget trading Luongo. Even if you could, you would get less in return, likely including a bad contract.
Meanwhile, the history of backup goalies making a meaningful impact in a Stanley Cup victory is virtually nonexistent — especially since the lockout and installation of the salary cap. Almost unfailingly, teams win or lose with their No. 1 guy.
And those No. 1’s who are wearing rings today? Since the year 2000, that lists includes Hall of Famers like Martin Brodeur and Patrick Roy, but also names like Nikolai Khabibulin, Cam Ward, J.S. Giguere, Chris Osgood (who won as a starter in the 90s, but started the ’08 playoffs as a backup) Marc-Andre Fleury and Antti Niemi.
Roberto Luongo fits somewhere in the upper-middle part of that group, if you listed those last six goalies from best to worst. Perhaps at the top.
The point is, Luongo is more than enough goaltender to win a Cup with. And no matter how poorly he played in Games 3, 4 and 6 at Boston last spring, the injury-plagued Canucks were steam-rolled by the bigger, stronger Bruins in those games. Fix that, and perhaps you fix the biggest leak.
A former general manager we spoke with this week said he would not be inclined to trade Schneider by the deadline, as he is not a depreciating asset. But, he added, “I’d listen at the deadline, just to see what’s out there.”
When we pointed out that the same big Bruins are likely to be at the end of the Canucks’ line again this spring — and that without Raffi Torres, Tanner Glass and Mikael Samuelsson this season, the Canucks are even less physical than they were a year ago — he waivered.
“Well,” he admitted, “that works to your point of trading Schneider.”
This is no time to leave driver in the bag. Grip it, rip it, and who knows:
Maybe this spring, Vancouver can win it.
$(“#poll_9064”).v2Poll({poll_id: 9064});
