We got some more trade action in the NHL this week as the Colorado Avalanche went out and addressed what was by far their biggest organizational need: Goaltending. General manager Chris McFarland acquired Mackenzie Blackwood from the San Jose Sharks in a deal that involved a total of nine assets going between the two teams.
It’s a mildly complicated deal, but, for the Avalanche, it completes what has been a total overhaul of their crease. Justus Annunen and Alexandar Georgiev are both out of the organization and they’ve been replaced by 28-year-old Mackenzie Blackwood and journeyman Scott Wedgewood.
They desperately needed to make this move as the start of their season has been tanked by poor goaltending. Colorado currently sits 31st in the league in 5v5 sv% and ranks 28th in 5v5 GA/60 despite being 14th in expected GA/60. It was not good and something had to give.
Blackwood has been having a pretty solid season on a wildly sub-par Sharks team and actually has some decent upside given his age and track record. 
He isn’t a standalone number-one goaltender, but he’s much better than what they had before, which is why the Avalanche ultimately felt like they could pay this price and the Sharks very clearly weren’t interested in lending a helping hand to them.
Colorado had to pay a somewhat significant cost when you compare this deal to other trades for goalies of similar quality.
Think back to last year’s trade deadline when the New Jersey Devils, Blackwood’s former team funny enough, acquired veteran Jake Allen from the Montreal Canadiens. That cost the Devils a conditional third-round pick and they even got the Canadiens to keep 50% of Allen’s contract, which at the time had one more year on the deal.
They got basically one and a half years of Allen at 50% retained for a conditional third-round pick.
MacFarland had to give up a second-round pick, retain money on Georgiev, and give up 25-year-old Nikolai Kovalenko, who had eight points on the season. It was a lot.
There were some Oilers fans who had been holding out hope that the Oilers would view Blackwood as a younger backup who the Oilers could acquire and then hopefully partner up with Stuart Skinner for the next few seasons to give the team a legitimate tandem that could play off each other. That’s obviously not going to happen now and I don’t blame the Oilers for not wanting to pay that price.
To put it into Oilers’ terms, would you have been okay with the Oilers giving up Calvin Pickard, Vasiliy Podkolzin, and a second-round pick in exchange for half a season of Blackwood? I wouldn’t have.
It’s not a perfect comparable because Podkolzin is younger and has more upside, but even just the idea of packaging a second-round pick with Pickard would have been too high of a price for me considering Blackwood needs a new deal at the end of the season and his next cap hit will be much, much higher than Pickards $1m price tag.
While I do understand the logic behind why some fans wanted to see the Oilers make a move for Blackwood, and still want the team to look at acquiring a goaltender ahead of the trade deadline, this move just came at too high of a price point. The reality is that the Oilers have needs elsewhere on the roster and only so many assets and so much salary cap room to fill those holes. 
As you can see from PuckPedia, the Oilers are already down their first two picks in this year’s draft. They have the two picks from the St. Louis Blues that came in return for Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg but they also don’t have any extra picks in the coming years. Sacrificing a second-round pick, which could be very valuable at the deadline, to add a 1B goalie with no playoff experience doesn’t make sense right now. 
If the ask was a fourth-round pick, which would have actually been a reasonable ask when you consider comparable deals like the previously mentioned Jake Allen trade, then I would have been all for the Oilers making a move for Blackwood.
The Avalanche were getting desperate and when other GMs sense that a team is in a position of weakness, they’ll usually up their asking price. It feels like that is exactly what has happened in this situation.
San Jose GM Mike Grier knew he had the Avalanche in a bad spot and he took advantage of that.
Yes, the Avalanche may have potentially fixed their goaltending problems but acquiring Blackwood is not a sure thing. It’s an upgrade but it’s also a gamble and they paid handsomely to make that gamble.
For the Oilers, patience continues to be the mantra. 
They need to let their cap space develop, they need to wait for clarification on when Evander Kane will be back, and they need to save their limited draft capital for when they know 100% what their biggest needs will be and what the market is like.
For that reason, they had to sit back as another Western Conference Stanley Cup hopeful made a big splash and filled a big hole in their lineup.