Blackhawks Trade Longest-Tenured Player In First Deal Of Trade Deadline
NHL trades will be allowed until Friday afternoon’s leaguewide deadline, but that didn’t stop the Chicago Blackhawks from beating everyone else to the punch.
As many, including myself, predicted for much of this season, Chicago shipped off defenseman Connor Murphy to the Oilers for Edmonton’s second-round pick in 2028. As expected, the Blackhawks will retain half of his $4.4 million salary for the rest of this season.
Murphy, 32, was a leader on and off the ice for the Blackhawks. He’s worn the “A” for multiple years and was a total class act despite never sniffing the playoffs (aside from the 2020 bubble). He’ll now get a chance for the first time in his career to fight for a playoff spot, as the Oilers find themselves in the third and final playoff spot in the Pacific Division with 21 games to play.
With this move, the Blackhawks are down to their final salary retention slot, with the other being used on Seth Jones until 2030. Assuming that one of Ilya Mikheyev or Jason Dickinson is sent off before Friday, they would probably use the final slot, which hampers Chicago just a bit, but likely not enough to matter to GM Kyle Davidson. Stan Bowman, of course, gets back the player he acquired in the Niklas Hjalmarsson trade in 2017. Since then, he appeared in 547 regular-season games in nine seasons.
The deal certainly isn’t bad value. The Blackhawks have five picks in the first two rounds of this summer’s draft already, as well as three in 2027. The move protects them in the long run and gives Davidson one more asset at his disposal. He could certainly flip it in this summer’s draft along with several other picks—I’ve written here plenty that the Blackhawks don’t need many more prospects; they need to package them for higher picks.
Chicago now has just three right-handed defensemen on the NHL roster: Artyom Levshunov, Sam Rinzel, and Louis Crevier. Kevin Korchinski played next to Murphy on Saturday against Colorado, so we could see a Korchinski–Rinzel pairing Tuesday in Winnipeg without much changing. Ethan Del Mastro seems like the most likely candidate to join the roster once the move is finalized later tonight, which would mean six of the Blackhawks’ seven defensemen would be age 24 or younger.