Judging the Rentals: Which NHL Trade Deadline Players Were the Best Catches?

Now that the trade deadline has come and gone in the NHL, the teams with new assets are evaluating what exactly they got for all of the prospects, picks and players that were sent the other way. Most meaningful players picked up at the deadline were done so for rental purposes as they always are, as teams just want to have them for a potential playoff run. Of course, a few teams made moves for cap reasons and just to shuffle personnel around — a small token to their fanbase that “shows” that the GM tried to do something.

To gauge the impact of some of these players on their respective teams, I figured that a simulation over a season of NHL 13 would tell an interesting tale as to how each player impacts their respective new teams. Oftentimes it seems that rental players get discarded just because a team gets bounced in the first round, so I thought it would be intriguing to see how they would hold up over a full season.

I simulated a full season and playoffs, and I enabled injuries for some reality. I disabled trades, as I wanted to see how these players would hold up over the long haul. It's not a perfect solution, but I figured it might give a good sense of what kind of impact some of these trade deadline players would have. For the purpose of this sim, I surveyed the trade deadline list and picked the ten players that I felt were the biggest acquisitions. This means that I focused on higher-profile trades and avoided teams swapping plugs for seventh rounders and trades of that sort.

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