Report: 5 teams actively seeking to trade for scoring help

Holiday trade freeze is looming, some more deals are coming.

HockeyFeed
HockeyFeed
Published 6 years ago
Report: 5 teams actively seeking to trade for scoring help
KeyStone Press

The NHL landscape has been very odd this season, with some teams over-performing, and many under-performing. This has caused trade speculation to be unusually elevated in the early-goings of this 2017-18 season.

Bruce Garrioch of the Ottawa Sun identified 5 teams that are actively seeking scoring help up front, including the Pittsburgh Penguins, Montreal Canadiens, Columbus Blue Jackets, Calgary Flames, and the Florida Panthers.

The Canadiens and Panthers are two teams that are struggling mightily through the first quarter of the season, while Pittsburgh is a middle-of-the-pact team that expects to be top dogs. 

Columbus and Calgary are faring quite well and their needs are more about bolstering their roster to put them over the top.

Players in trade discussions have included Evander Kane, Alex Galchenyuk, John Tavares, Chris Kreider, Carl Hagelin, Mats Zuccarello, and more. There's no shortage of high-end talent being talked about in trade conversations. Tavares is very unlikely to be traded this year, but the possibility isn't zero. If he was going to sign in New York, he would've done it by now. Something is holding him back, and Garth Snow may run out of time before the deadline to trade his rights.

There are certainly other teams around the league actively searching for scoring help, such as the Anaheim Ducks, a team believed to have been trying to land one of Vadim Shipachyov or Matt Duchene before they ultimately went elsewhere.

With December on the horizon, GMs are starting to have a clearer picture of what they have and will start making the changes needed to either compete, retool, or rebuild.

We may be in for an interesting few weeks leading up to the holiday trade freeze.