Hello and welcome back all to the world's most trusted source when it comes to all things NHL salary life and love. Wow…that's all that I have to say in the world of NHL transactions. One in particular that took place while eating dinner on Friday night. Let's talk about two moves that happened in the league, what it means for the club's involved, and of course what the ramifications are for your fantasy team. Before we get to the trade that you're probably all here to read about, let's get the "other" deal that happened out of the way first because it is important.

The Edmonton Oilers acquire Tristan Jarry ($5.37M AAV) and Samuel Poulin ($775K AAV) from the Pittsburgh Penguins for Stuart Skinner ($2.6M AAV), Brett Kulak (2.75M AAV), and a 2029 2nd round pick

So, this trade happens Friday morning and I immediately text my fantasy group – "This is like in Chel franchise mode when the CPU starts making weird trades". Only magic can happen when Kyle Dubas and Stan Bowman (Dr. Death) hop on a call together.

Tuesday night, Leon Draisaitl reached his 1,000^th point, the Oilers celebrate…right in front of Stuart Skinner who is wearing his Edmonton Oilers mask along with his Pittsburgh black and yellow, and I want to start there on the Pittsburgh side. They get Brett Kulak in this deal, who offensively may not be where he was last season, and that's putting it mildly. He's currently on a 26-game pointless streak which I needed to know if that was the longest by an active player, so I asked AI, which told me that Nikita Kucherov has the longest pointless streak. Someone might need to fact check that for me unless I had a hallucination that he just had two assists versus the Islanders the other night.

Either way, Brett Kulak comes back, no doubt to make the salaries work, and along with him comes Stuart Skinner and a 2029 2^nd round pick. The pick is nothing to throw away, and while earth might be a wasteland by 2029, I'll happily take a 2^nd rounder anywhere I can get it. For Skinner, I defended him some during last year's playoffs, but this season has been a tough go. With only a quarter of his first 20 starts registering as quality and carrying a negative goal saved above average, he's been struggling but put together a couple decent outings leading up to Tuesday's game, not to mention those pesky visas. What I like here for Pittsburgh is the flexibility that they now have in net and get out of the Tristan Jarry contract. This is like what the Ottawa Senators did for years – Sign a player to a contract that didn't age well, trade him, then celebrate that the bad contract that they put together was off their books.

Skinner is set to become a UFA this July and if I'm Pittsburgh this is a good tryout to see what I want my netminder situation to look like going forward. They can rotate starts with Skinner and Arturs Silovs, and have Joel Blomqvist available, who has appeared in 15 NHL games already. They also have Sergei Murashov, who has emerged as a good goaltending prospect for them, who is probably a year or two away right now as things stand. Look, I love having options in net. It's like in baseball when a team has two or three catchers that they're in-between–that's a good problem to have. If Skinner puts together some decent starts for a Pittsburgh team that is higher in the standings than I think we all anticipated then great, you can come to the table with a goaltender still in his late 20's. All goes wrong and the 'Pens decide to not tender him an offer, oh well. You walk away with more cap space than you originally had plus a pick down the road.

For fantasy, if you're starting Stuart Skinner as your primary option in net, odds are you've been in some trouble throughout the season. If you're in a league that starts two-goaltenders, then sure it makes sense to give him the nod but where he does have a nice advantage is his AAV isn't unmanageable for those that might be right up against the salary cap ceiling. The hope here is he can somehow get up to a .900% save percentage and maybe in Pittsburgh that's possible but my guess is he'll share the net more often going forward this season.

Now onto Edmonton. Oh boy. Okay, so we all (meaning everyone who has watched one minute of Oilers hockey in the last eight months) can probably all agree the weakness here was in net…right? Despite what Stan Bowman said last February, this was an issue. Now, I'm not 100% sure here that Tristan Jarry is your answer, and I'd love to know just how this deal came together. Not only did they have to give up a player and a pick to make the salaries work, but then they had to go out and trade a 3rd rounder to fill the gap on their blueline by acquiring Spencer Stastney, Honestly, in stepping back from this deal,it's sort of a three-team trade?

If there's one positive here, it's that I agree that Edmonton couldn't approach this upcoming playoff with the same goaltending situation, so in that respect I don't mind this move. Where I scratch my head though is the target they picked in Jarry, a goaltender who has never won a playoff series, carries an AAV that's worth as much as Skinner and Kulak combined, and he’s going to be entering his age-31 season. We even have a term for a "Jarry" in my fantasy league, and that's giving up four goals on 24 shots. This is also the same goaltender who gave up the first goal of a game on the first shot last season nine times. Look, I don't mean to bury this deal, but I don't see how Jarry and Calvin Pickard are a better duo with Jarry signed to a contract that I don't know if half the league would want to take on. Sure, salary cap is going to rise this offseason, for right now in the present, I sort of think that Edmonton has their hand off the chess piece as for moves that they can make. I guess I'm just…I'll go "worried" about this trade for a club that a club that are contingent on deep playoff success with the top-heavy talent that they have on their roster.

For fantasy, maybe Jarry gets more run in net which could lead to more wins but in leagues where goals against are heavily weighted against you, it's always a gamble to give him the start. In the last week he's posted an .874 Sv% so starting him may not even be matchup dependent, but more focused on need in net.

The Minnesota Wild acquire Quinn Hughes ($7.85M AAV) from the Vancouver Canucks for Marco Rossi ($5M AAV), Liam Ohgren ($866K AAV), Zeev Buium ($966K AAV), and a 2026 1st round pick

I've gone back and forth on how I want to approach what is one of the largest, if not the largest trade I've ever covered on Capped and I think the best way to start is by breaking down the trade itself, before we get into what it means for each club and fantasy.

This trade is Quinn Hughes for four first round picks. Hughes is a top-3overall defenseman in the game today, and the haul back is one that I'm not sure many clubs could offer for him. I know New Jersey is going to be brought up but A) Yes. He has siblings in the league that play for them, but I categorize that notion along with when I hear a player choosing their FA destination because "they're from there"and B-Z) New Jersey couldn't match this offer despite how high people are on Nemec. Look, I love Devils fans and have written about that in the past, but I don't think this trade package exists for them. I look at the Rangers, Detroit, even Ottawa to a certain extent and nothing really comes close given what can be offered and matching the money. Even if a Godfather offer was sent to Vancouver that trumped what Minnesota had on the table, Jim Rutherford for Vancouver clearly likes to move fast and so I'm not surprised this deal got done and did not linger the closer we got to the Christmas break.

For the Wild, they can extend Hughes as soon as July if both parties agree on a number but I think if you only had him as a season in a half rental, I'll take that deal. Minnesota will probably find themselves second or third in the Central, and given how loaded that division is, two of the three at the top might be out of playoffs by the first week of May. I wrote here over the summer that I wanted to pick the Wild as my Cup favorite but didn't because I did not like their offseason with all the creative things that they could do, and if I was them, I would have been praying someone submitted an offer sheet on Marco Rossi.  This is the type of move I was hoping for, and it opens up so many avenues for this club. You now have (probably) the best or second-best blue line in all of hockey and that's in front of two goaltenders in Filip Gustavsson and Jesper Wallstedt that, unless something goes south, are your Jennings Trophy tandem. This move also allows Minnesota to not rely on Brock Faber as the power play QB and instead can rely on excellent zone entries with Hughes, who at home, could be on the ice with the Kirill Kaprizov line as often as they see fit. I can't say that I've been the biggest fan of Faber at $8.5M but if Hughes coming in opens him up to improvement then I'm here for it as you can pair the two together as LD/RD. This is also a club that's going to have excellent size on their blue line, along with down the middle with Rossi going the other way in this deal. Really, I can't speak enough to how much better an already good club got with one move.

Salary cap-wise for the Wild, their buyout charges decrease even more this upcoming season and will find themselves like most of the clubs in the NHL that will have around $13M in available spend. Right now, I'd have a hard time seeing another move being made for the Wild, and if there was one, it would have to be a fringe transaction with their IR and LTIR money coming off for playoffs. For fantasy, I mean its Quinn Hughes. I'm guessing I don't need to go too much further here.

For Vancouver…I've gone back and forth on this several times already., but that's about par for the course for the Canucks as I still can't decide if the Brock Boeser extension was at all worth it now. I don't want to be a prisoner of revisionist history but from that game seven against Edmonton to now…like, how did we get here? I remember where I was (getting my windshield fixed) when the Horvat trade came through and couldn't believe how little the return was. I also remember writing a couple articles here about the J.T. Miller/Elias Pettersson pity party and questioning if this was being brought to light for the same reasons that the Quinn Hughes situation was, and that was to get chips thrown in the middle from across the league. As far as what came back for the Canucks, I was happy with one, maybe two of the pieces, but this is a situation to which this club knew that they had a premium asset that they could shop for the maximum return.

I'll say that I have never been the biggest Marco Rossi fan, and that goes back to his World Juniors with Austria. I've had debates about this with one of my friends and we're allowed to do so because we're both Austrian. Somehow to me, that makes sense. For fantasy and,well, "real life", Rossi is a second-line center that can help out on the power play at times. He sits at a $5M AAV and will become Arb eligible in 2028-29.

Moving on to Ohgren, this is an interesting piece. The 19th overall pick in '22 has definite offensive upside and for those in salary leagues, he is a bargain right now on his ELC playing for the Canucks. Fantasy players can now hope that the offensive struggles he had in Minnesota may lift with more ice time as he already has his first goal in a Canucks sweater in two games played. The 1^st round pick that the Canucks received always helps, even with that pick potentially coming late round one.

Now on to the real prize here, and that's Zeev Buium. I could not be higher on him, so much so I have a story to share – My wife is in the airline industry, and so I've met and made friends with others that take to the skies for work. One of our family friends had Brian Campbell on a flight who is the Blackhawks hockey operations advisor. I get a text asking if I wanted to ask him anything and this was about a week before the '24 draft. The Hawks had the third pick, and I sent a text back saying the following, "Don't overthink it, take Buium" …apparently, he got a chuckle and a 'Go Hawks'.

Every season there's something that's true and that's that we fall all over these defensemen who can create their own shot in playoffs or Frozen Four, while also playing excellent in the defensive zone. So, with that, what am I missing here? Buium might not be Quinn Hughes, very few are, but if he's like a Morgan Rielly puck mover that can run a power play and create from the point, I'm in. If the Canucks do have any of these alleged issues in the room, this is someone that can come in and be a positive. This is a blue-chip player that in dynasty leagues should be taken in the first round. At 16 points on the season, he'll very likely be put into a larger role on his new club.

While I'm not sure that I have confidence in the folks running the show in Canuck-land, the road isn't all bad for adjusting this roster. That's not just being optimistic either: you have your goaltender signed in Thatcher Demko, pieces that can still be moved for assets like Kiefer Sherwood, and not a bad prospect pool to draw talent from. If you can add those in with a high pick and some cap space then maybe the road isn't as dark as it seemed on Friday night.

*Salary Cap data from PuckPedia.com  

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