This is a series of stories that will highlight some of the more consequential trades made throughout the 18-year history of the EURO League. We aren’t looking for the most one-sided deals or the ones that seemed to help both sides … we’re just looking at the trades and how they affected the league. We were originally intending to identify the Top 10 trades in league history, but that’s just impossible and super subjective. So, instead, we’ll give an overview of everything. No judgments.
Well, some judgments.
PART I: The Very Beginning
The EURO League has seen seasons in which not much trading occurred and it has weathered trading storms that attempted to totally rebuild franchises. But the period of the most trading occurred before the first official faceoff ever occurred.
While the initial draft for the league was going on, draft picks and player names were flying around like bikini tops at a Berlin Smurfs party. There were 33 trades made before Game 1 as teams tried set their franchises’ foundations just the way they wanted. Some wanted to win right away. Bern, Geneva and Oslo in particular traded away good future assets to stock up on affordable veteran talent. Others had a more long-term vision in mind.
Of the 24 general managers in the draft, only five didn’t get involved in the trading. Bern made nine deals including two that included players they just drafted, Minsk made eight, Geneva made seven and Oslo made five. That first season seemed to boil down to an arms race with two Swiss teams making headlong rushes for the Cup. Geneva under GM Ryan Jones prevailed and Bern under Adam R bailed. Literally. He quit the league. Jones also quit soon after and Oslo’s GM, Coach Frenchy, left too, leaving revolving doors of GMs to try to turn around franchises with hardly any assets.
Minsk, on the other hand, under Igor Kirunov had a longer view in mind. He obtained first round picks for the next season from St. Petersburg and Oslo, which netted him Thomas Powell and Alexander Galchenyuk. Side note: Galchenyuk was traded to Prague soon after for Zach Parise, who was then dealt to Gothenberg for Milan Lucic and two first-round picks. And then one of those picks was traded along with two players to Zurich for Patrick Kane. So, a little sacrificing in the beginning and some patient and clever dealing afterwards yielded Powell, Lucic, Kane and eventually some Cup glory. And today, Galchenyuk is back in Hussar black.
During that first draft, the typical trade was something along these lines: “Round 17 pick and 2014 Round 1 pick for Round 8 pick and Round 19 pick.”
But there were also some big names occasionally tossed into the blender. The top overall pick – Gabriel Landeskog – went from Milan to Madrid for Dustin Brown and two later-round picks; Alexander Ovechkin and a future 1st round pick went from Dublin to Moscow for Phil Kessel and Bobby Ryan; Claude Giroux went from Bern to Frankfurt; and Daniel Sedin went from Bern to Oslo.
Once the season started there were more than a dozen more trades with a couple that stand out for different reasons.
Sedin’s twin brother Henrik was also traded (They did everything in unison). Since they were basically the same player, it’s fun to see what the prices were in the two trades. Bern drafted Daniel in Round 3 but quickly traded him along with a Round 12 pick for a 4th and a 6th. We think waiting for the season standings to develop a little would have been a better move because less than two months into the season, Henrik netted a better catch. Milan gave up Jordan Staal, Chris Kreider and a Round 2 pick to get him from Madrid.
And then in mid-December, a trade occurred that had historical significance. Helsinki really wanted goalie Henrik Lundquist and were willing to part with Ilya Bryzgalov, a Round 2 pick … and a forward who would only become the league’s all-time leader scorer, John Tavares.
Next: Trade Deadline deals
