Gear: Inside an NHL team war room on trade deadline day – Daily Faceoff

The trade deadline is now less than a week away. Hockey fans likely have grandiose notions of what goes on in hockey “war rooms” across the NHL, visions of executives frantically working the phones, pounding their fists on tables and making deals that will alter the courses of their franchises.

All those things do happen, to be sure. There are moments of intense excitement, white-knuckled holding of breath and down-to-the-wire decision making, whether a team is making blockbuster trades or some minor tinkering trades.

But at the risk of ruining the illusion of the NHL war room: it’s all about the food.        

The last 48 hours or so before the trade deadline are characterized by intermittent periods of intense activity and debate followed by agonizingly long periods of waiting. Being in a constant state of readiness to act is gruelling, but it’s made even more difficult by the waiting. The offer is out and you wait for a response. Or you wait for an offer. Or a counter-offer. Or even a call to be returned.  A sign that someone still has interest. 

The clock watching can be excruciating. To pass the time and to quell the nervous energy, there is a lot of eating. The NHL isn’t universally known in hockey circles as the Never Hungry League for nothing. To properly survive a deadline day, it is crucial for teams to have their snack game in order. 

I’m only partly kidding. The time leading up to deadline day is an intense period of hard work that I’m not trying to diminish with lighthearted banter about food. The reality is, though, that there is a ton of down time between legitimate deal discussions, especially for the broader hockey-operations support group not directly participating in the GM discussions. Food invariably becomes a significant part of the idle time.    

As you near the end, the war room is populated with a pretty large group of soldiers on standby: the team’s analytics group, its advisors, its pro scouts (who typically fly in for the last couple of days) and at least a few amateur scouts, not to mention communications / PR staff and administrative support staff. That’s a lot of people intently waiting for updates and instructions, and a lot of mouths to feed.

In my time with the Vancouver Canucks (and I guarantee we were not dissimilar from other teams), I saw ungodly amounts of chips, cookies, nuts, trail mix, Gummi bears and chocolate disappear from view in a single day. Some vegetable platters, too, but I’m pretty sure the cauliflower wasn’t as big a hit as the cashews. Rogers Arena was about 100 feet from Vancouver’s downtown Costco, so we had an edge in the bulk snacks department, and we took advantage. That’s on top of the catered breakfast that was ready at 5:00 a.m. (west coast teams have to start early!), the catered lunch that capped off deadline day and the dinner out that celebrated any deals that got completed.      

The General Manager doesn’t generally make/ take calls in the same room with all members of the hockey staff present. That would be pretty cumbersome and unwieldy, so those calls generally happen in the GM’s office or a smaller boardroom with a select few lieutenants who carry updates back and forth to the rest of the group. But that didn’t mean the upper brass was immune from the gorging. Jim Benning had a cookie stash, John Weisbrod drank espresso shots like they were water and Jonathan Wall was partial to – in his own words – any damn food item he could get his hands on. When Trevor Linden was with the organization, he would feast on peanut M&Ms. He called them his power pellets. I was a sucker for BarkTHINS chocolate.

The extra sugar is critical to keeping up the pace after weeks of slogging through the preparation and groundwork. They say luck happens at the intersection of preparation and opportunity, so to make your own luck, a front office needs to be as prepared as possible before it can seize an opportunity. You have to know what every other team is looking to accomplish, who all of their prospects are at every level, what draft picks they have available and what the cap implications of each move might be.     

This is where the extended war room, hopped up on candy and caffeine, can make a big difference in the final hours. Most of the work has been done well before deadline day, but the pro scouts, amateur scouts and analytics group work together to continue refining their rankings of all the prospects and draft picks a target team may possess, comparing that to the prospect groups and draft picks of other target teams and then funnelling updates and revisions to the GM.

The group also prepares updated roster, salary-cap and draft-pick grids including every team after each significant deadline transaction, ensuring that the brass had knowledge of every team’s playing roster, cap situation and draft capital in real-time. The war room was also where the group would monitor the broadcast coverage of deadline transactions, updating the GM on what had just transpired, who has come off the board and whether any expected returns were trending up or down based on those deals.

This year, war rooms will of course be watching the commercial-free streaming deadline coverage from the Daily Faceoff team instead of the TV networks they have watched in the past. If they aren’t close to a Costco, they can just call DoorDash for delivery!

Deadline day is when push comes to shove, and not just when it comes to the last bag of Doritos in the conference room. Teams may have been dangling their guy, or expressing casual interest in your guy, for weeks, but they finally have to make their best offers. Yet, even at this late stage, deals rarely happen without several back and forth calls between GMs, with each side using the, “I think I’d do that but I’ll check with my group” or “I just have to check with my owner” delay tactic as a way to buy additional time and maybe find something better before circling back to close. It’s a game of chicken at the end (this time I’m not talking about food) and nobody wants to be the one giving in and veering off their intended course. 

The final minutes before a deadline are absolutely the most tense but often the most productive. The NHL requires that, for a trade to be effective, notice of the deal has to be emailed to the league office, and that email has to be received on the NHL servers prior to 3:00pm ET. Imagine nailing down a trade at the last minute only to fail to get the notice to the league on time. Stories out there say it has happened. I have literally been in the situation where I typed out two different emails to the league with alternate trade particulars, just so that I was in a position to hit “send” on one of them when something finally got approved and I wouldn’t miss the deadline in the time it took me to type the particulars.

On at least two occasions during my Canucks’ tenure, deals happened in the final moments, and I was glad my emails were pre-cooked (is that another food reference???). When timing is tight, there is no better feeling of relief than getting the email receipt from NHL Central Registry, time-stamped before the 3:00 ET deadline.

And that’s noon on the west coast. Just in time for lunch.

Chris Gear joined Daily Faceoff in January after a 12-year run with the Vancouver Canucks, most recently as the club’s Assistant General Manager and Chief Legal Officer. Before migrating over to the hockey operations department, where his responsibilities included contract negotiations, CBA compliance, assisting with roster and salary cap management and governance for the AHL franchise, Gear was the Canucks’ vice president and general counsel.

Click here to read Gear’s other Daily Faceoff stories.

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