The NHL should bring back trades for the rest of the season.

The National Hockey League now appears intent on scheduling their draft in the first week of June 2020 in spite of the ongoing situation that has forced them to suspend play in the 2019 - 2020 regular season. Now there are a number of issues with that idea which I won't discuss here, but the biggest one in my estimation is how boring this draft is likely to be if things remain as they are. There will be no trades of any significance and teams will be reluctant to move players, even those on expiring contracts, because of the uncertainty surrounding the future of the aforementioned regular season.

Many have suggested that the NHL should open up the trade market ahead of the June draft in order to allow teams to make more significant moves, moves that would no doubt improve the entertainment quality of the draft all the while giving hockey fans something to talk about after weeks and weeks without hockey. Most of these arguments however have been met with a fair share of detractors, and understandably so, but today Sean McIndoe of The Athletic made the most compelling argument I have heard yet to re-open the trade market. 

The rumblings behind the scenes suggest that the NHL will look to move to a 24 team playoff format and with so many teams making it in, including teams that likely believed they wouldn't make it prior to the NHL trade deadline, things have changed drastically. McIndoe argues that teams would have acted differently, and I agree, and I also believe that this speaks to the competitive integrity of allowing those teams into the playoffs.

From McIndoe:

Some teams would have gone into the February deadline assuming they weren’t making the postseason. Now they might be. They would have passed on the chance to add reinforcements, and in some cases, they may have been sellers who weakened their roster. Those deals are done, and we can’t undo them. But what we can do is give bubble teams a chance to reset, and to react to the radically different circumstances they now find themselves in.

Probably the biggest hurdle to getting this done would be getting the National Hockey League Player's Association to sign off the whole deal, after all who wants to be traded right now? That being said I think this is a really fun idea and if the NHL can find a way to implement it I definitely think they should go for it.