Trevor van Riemsdyk’s Vegas residency lasted one night only, as the Golden Knights flipped him to the Hurricanes on Thursday (along with a seventh-round draft pick next year) for a second-round pick in this weekend’s draft. It raised the obvious question: Why didn’t the Blackhawks just do that, rather than lose van Riemsdyk for absolutely nothing in the expansion draft?
But it appeared teams were more reluctant to acquire players before the expansion draft, for fear they’d just wind up losing them there. Either that or they’d have to protect the newly acquired player, forcing them to expose another player. The wheeling and dealing kicked in Thursday when the expansion-draft roster freeze was lifted.
“There was a perception throughout the season that there was going to be all this flood of activity leading into the expansion draft, but it didn’t really play out that way,” Hawks general manager Stan Bowman said. “I think everyone’s in the same position, where they have a certain number of players they can protect. As a result, you saw maybe a couple of moves, but very few of those [big] types of transactions because everyone had their own little puzzle to put together.”
Van Riemsdyk joins ex-Hawks Scott Darling, Teuvo Teravainen, Joakim Nordstrom and Klas Dahlbeck in Carolina.
Whither Kruger?
Bowman declined to get into Marcus Kruger’s situation. Kruger, who has a sizable $3.08 million cap hit, was initially expected to head to Vegas as part of a package deal with van Riemsdyk, and still might be dealt away, perhaps even to the Golden Knights, a league source said.
“There’s been a lot of rumors around, but Marcus is no different than any other player,” Bowman said. “I don’t really have anything to add on that front.”
Follow me on Twitter @MarkLazerus.
Email: mlazerus@suntimes.com
RELATED STORIES
Marian Hossa’s on-ice production, example will be tough to replace
Bowman on replacing Hossa: “It’s not as simple as people might think’
