The Edmonton Oilers were unable to secure a top defenceman
at this summer’s NHL Draft. This is certainly concerning, but the good news for
the Oilers is that they were not alone: Nobody secured a top defenceman. In
fact, outside of a swap of somewhat comparable second-pair defenders between
Buffalo and Florida, no NHL defender of any importance even moved.

Leaving aside the unlikely possibility that no defencemen
are going to be traded at all this summer, that means there’s still action to
come.

Peter Chiarelli framed
the issue in an interesting way on Saturday. Here’s what he said:

He’s right. Generally the draft is the deadline that opens
the floodgates on trades, but that wasn’t the case this year.

July 1 is an interesting milestone in two ways. The first is
that, as Chiarelli himself acknowledged in the same scrum, there really aren’t
that many defencemen on the open market. Teams looking to upgrade their blue
line will likely know in fairly short order during this shopping period whether
or not they have a shot at one of the available players. Those that don’t are
going to have more incentive to pay the high prices being demanded by teams with
defencemen available.

The other way July 1 is interesting, at least for me,
relates to P.K. Subban. At this point, it would be surprising to see Subban
traded, but it’s worth remembering that the primary deadline for Montreal to
make a deal has always been the start of his no-move clause on July 1. The
passing of the draft makes a deal less likely because there’s less of a baited
hook for the Canadiens to take, but if a team believes that Montreal was
serious about making a deal there’s little reason to drop discussions entirely
until that NMC comes into effect.

The counterpoint to all of this is that trade rumours almost
always exceed trade reality in terms of volume. Some of the names being bandied
about won’t be traded, and there’s no way of knowing how many moves we’re going
to see in total.

It’s worth remembering though that there are incentives for
teams with defencemen to make a move.

The passing of the draft did nothing to reduce the Blues’ salary concerns or
the looming fact of Kevin Shattenkirk entering free agency a year from now. It didn’t
alleviate the logjam
of rearguards on the Anaheim Ducks’ blue line or change the fact that
Hampus Lindholm—like fellow RFA’s Jacob Trouba, Seth Jones and Tyson Barrie—all
still need new contracts.

That’s without even getting into the Ducks’ need for a
scoring left wing or the Blues’ desire for a game-breaking scorer or the list
of teams that could really use a Ryan Nugent-Hopkins or Leon Draisaitl at
centre.

So far, those pressures, combined with the pressure on teams
like the Oilers to add defence, have not resulted in trades. I still think they
will at some point in the near future.