What Capitals’ summer retool shows us about value of swinging big at trade deadline

The 2025 trade deadline has come and gone, the season’s home stretch has arrived, and the NHL’s post-season landscape is coming further into focus. 

By and large, it was a case of the rich getting richer on March 7. The Dallas Stars, one of the most dangerous squads in the league already, emerged with an all-world scorer, while the defending champion Florida Panthers made themselves even tougher to match up with come playoff time. But for many of the rest of the likely post-season field, there are what-ifs lingering in the air post-deadline — fans wondering why their club didn’t swing bigger, why they didn’t land the game-changing piece that could’ve taken their team from middle-of-the-pack to all-out contender.

Look up at the teams that are rolling this season, though — and at the recent run of squads who’ve gone all the way to the Stanley Cup summit — and there seems to be a trend: The most important business, the boldest swings, are done in the off-season, rather than at the deadline with the clock ticking. Champions are built in the summer, rarely in March.

The club that’s been the story of 2024-25 to this point, who successfully made that leap from middling participant to genuine contender in a one-year span, seems proof enough. 

Rewind to this time last year, and the Washington Capitals were mired in the wild-card race — they were a playoff team, but just barely, with the worst goal differential of any team that got to the dance. Now, heading into the home stretch of 2024-25, they sit tied atop the standings — already with more points than they had by the end of last season — with the second-best goal differential in the league, too.

You can trace their overhaul to a string of off-season swings that rebuilt the spine of their roster. In net, there was the deal that brought Logan Thompson to town — the former Golden Knight has been one of the league’s best goaltenders this season. On the blue line, there was the acquisition of Jakob Chychrun, who’s become an important offensive spark from the back end. And up front, there was the deal to bring in Pierre-Luc Dubois, the oft-maligned pivot who now ranks as one of the Caps’ most productive scorers.

At the deadline, on the other hand, Washington did little, adding only depth forward Anthony Beauvillier. The club that’s been vying for the top spot alongside them all season, the Winnipeg Jets, took largely the same approach. Thriving on the back of a core that’s been built methodically over the past decade, the Jets added only on the fringes too, bringing in Luke Schenn and Brandon Tanev, opting to avoid upsetting the chemistry that’s carried them this far.

Go back through the past half-decade of Stanley Cup champs, and their deadline action tells a similar story. The defending champion Panthers added a pair of elder snipers at last year’s deadline, bringing in 32-year-old Vladimir Tarasenko and 35-year-old Kyle Okposo. The 2023 Golden Knights added some forward depth in Ivan Barbashev and Teddy Blueger, and a backup netminder in Jonathan Quick. The 2022 Avalanche bolstered their forward corps with Artturi Lehkonen, Andrew Cogliano and Nico Sturm, and shored up their blue line with Josh Manson. The 2021 Lightning added only David Savard, while a year prior the club brought in depth pieces Blake Coleman and Barclay Goodrow.

There’s no doubt some of those acquisitions wound up playing key roles during those Cup runs. But they were added to cores that looked poised to do some playoff damage regardless. Bigger picture, that recent history suggests the deadline can help you if you’re already close, if you’ve built a team that could make some serious noise — perhaps go all the way — if all that’s needed is to add on the fringes, to augment what you already are. 

If a front office nails that off-season work and has a genuine contender on their hands, the deadline can be crucial in peppering in some additional help. But if that foundation already seems flawed, trying to correct it in March — by swapping out a starting goaltender, say, or trying to significantly upend the top six — seems a hefty gamble. And that gamble is further undone by the fact that players acquired only weeks before the post-season have little time to acclimate to their new surroundings, get up to speed, and show their best — a minor issue for someone coming in to play a bit part, a bigger one for someone added in as a core piece.

All of which makes the Stars’ deadline a fascinating one.

Even before landing Mikko Rantanen, Dallas had already slowly and steadily built one of the league’s most promising squads. Fresh off a half-decade that’s seen them earn one trip to the Cup Final, and two straight trips to the Conference Final, the Stars entered this campaign as a Cup favourite. A strong regular season to this point has them right up there with the Caps and Jets as the best performers of 2024-25.

But while those other two league leaders largely stood pat in March, the Stars seem to have managed a dual approach — finding success by building a solid, championship-worthy foundation and swinging big at the deadline to add a franchise-altering piece.

Meanwhile, the other side of Rantanen’s journey to Texas shows the perils of trying to significantly retool a squad at the deadline.

The Hurricanes have long boasted a roster full of promise, but also one with holes. Seeing a player of Rantanen’s calibre come on the market, they gambled on a major in-season shake-up, trading out a homegrown star in Martin Necas, along with a bunch of other assets, for the chance to try to negotiate an extension under chaotic circumstances, with time running out on them. In the end, Carolina was forced to pivot and frantically find a deal to flip Rantanen, doing decently well in winding up with Logan Stankoven and a quartet of picks. Still, given how the whole saga concluded, it’s fair to wonder if they’re better off than they were in December, and whether such a swing would’ve been better handled had it played out in the summer, rather than over a compressed one-month stretch of tumult.

And then there’s Colorado. The 2022 champs have struggled some over the past two seasons since their championship run, getting bounced in the early rounds in 2023 and 2024. So far, 2024-25 has seen them take an odd approach, carrying out major in-season roster surgery throughout the campaign. 

The move to land Mackenzie Blackwood in December to shore up the goaltending was a worthwhile one, coming early enough in the season that Blackwood had time to settle in and make a difference for the team. But a month later, the Avs traded away Rantanen — a core piece, and a franchise icon — as they seemingly bailed early on trying to get him inked long-term. Then came a trade in early March to bring in Ryan Lindgren, another in the lead-up to the deadline to add Brock Nelson, and a couple more on deadline day to acquire Charlie Coyle and Erik Johnson.

How they perform past Game 82 should be an interesting case study when it comes to this question of in-season vs. off-season work. On paper, there’s an argument to be made that Colorado is a better club now than it was when the season began, with Rantanen’s cap space essentially allotted to a few different pieces throughout the lineup. On the other hand, the Avalanche hurtle toward the post-season trying to work in a crew of new centres, a new top-line winger, and a couple new defencemen — this after turning the net over to a new No. 1 goaltender just a few months ago, too. 

Maybe it all comes together on the fly and the Avs go on a run, or maybe it winds up simply too much change to navigate during the day-to-day mess of a regular season. The clubs that look best positioned to make some serious noise when the playoffs arrive seem to be the ones who took the opposite approach — entering the season with a group ready to perform, building with them all season long, and then throwing a booster or two into the mix for the home stretch. 

With just over a month to go before the regular season concludes and the real test begins, time will tell which approach wins out.