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 II: The Trade Deadline

The annual trade deadline in January is exciting for some, tense for others and a big yawn for many more. History shows deadline deals rarely propel teams to the top of the heap.

Popular thinking is that there are two main factors that drive trading at the deadline:

1) A team challenging for the Cup needs a player or two to give them a better chance.

2) A player’s contract is expiring at the end of the season and the team wants to get something for him rather than letting him walk away for nothing to free agency.

In the EURO League, examples of Factor No. 1 have been few and far between. In the 17 previous seasons, there were only three examples of teams making last-minute deadline deals and then winning the Cup Finals. In short, most of the winning teams were built in the off season and previous seasons.

Here are the three trades made at the deadline by teams that later won the Cup:

Season 1: Geneva acquired backup goalie Niklas Backstrom from their chief rival, Bern, for two 3rd-round picks. Backstrom seemed to have made a difference. He was 4-0 for Geneva and Geneva finished 4 points ahead of his former team in the standings to give the Generals home ice throughout the playoffs. Bern was upset by Munich and never had the chance of challenging Geneva in the conference finals.

Season 2: Paris made two trades at the deadline with Stockholm, a team that was busy making four trades to stockpile draft picks. Travis Hamonic and Ryan Clowe joined Paris (Dmitry Orlov and two draft picks left) and the Rouge Eiffels won their only Cup.

Season 6: Minsk made two trades at the deadline and beat Paris in the Cup Finals. The Hussars traded with Zurich to obtain Janne Niskala for young Dmitrij Jaskin straight up and they gave up young Kevin Hayes and two 2nd-round picks to get Olivier Roland.

Another deadline trade that almost worked came in Season 13 when Helsinki reacquired Anze Kopitar from Bratislava for a prospect. Kopitar had won the league scoring title and was voted Player of the Year the year before but he signed to play for Bratislava before he realized he hated everybody there. And then the feeling became mutual. In 33 games for the Eagles, he scored only 19 points. In 39 games back in Helsinki, he scored 49 points. The Jokerits made it to the Finals but lost there to Berlin.

Another example of a deadline reach didn’t quite work was in Season 10 when 5th-place Stockholm and 9th-place Helsinki hooked up in a trade that saw four players plus two picks go one way and three players and two picks go the other way. The biggest names going to Sweden were Kyle Okposo and Blake Wheeler.

Trade factor 2 (the get something for a guy before his contract expires kind) have been pretty frequent.

A recent example was in Season 15 when Lisbon GM Bryan Camara cleared the deck for a rebuild that has definitely worked already. His team managed to climb into the Top 5 of the league this season. Almost three years ago, Camara bid tearful good-byes to John Tavares, Steven Stamkos and Cam Fowler in deals with Paris and Belfast that netted him two 1st-round picks, two 2nd-round picks as well as Shane Pinto, prospect Joakim Kemell and veterans Anders Lee and Claude Giroux. Several of the pieces Camara acquired have been incorporated into subsequent trades that have brought more first-round picks as well as Gabriel Landeskog, Staffan Kronwall and Tyler Bertuzzi to Lisbon.

Three years before those deadline deals, Camara made two deadline deals with the opposite goal in mind: he was going for it and he utilized the relatively new salary retention option to add Dmitry Orlov and Tyson Barrie to the defense corps. Camara parted with five players and a 3rd-round pick, but of those assets, only Erik Gudbranson and Christoph Korner have since proven to be of value.

There have been examples of teams getting huge hauls for players at the deadline. Two very similar trades occurred a year apart back in the old days. In Season 3, Zach Parise went from Minsk to Gothenburg for Milan Lucic and two 1st-round picks. A year later, Max Pacioretty went from Lisbon to Moscow for Darnell Nurse and two 1st-round picks.

Just before each of the last two trade deadlines (Seasons 16 and 17), Kosice went to town with deals that didn’t seem to fit into either of the two previously mentioned factors. General Manager Daniel Podmanicky had a different goal in mind and he was able to acquire a great young player in each season: Adam Fantilli in Season 16 and Kaapo Kakko last season. But they didn’t come to Slovakia for free. To get them, he traded away Alexei Bereglazov, Arber Xhekaj, Alex Nylander, Alexander Radulov, a prospect and a 1st-round pick in the trades with Amsterdam and Dublin.

But if the trade deadline was a person, he would get a slight headache thinking about what happened in Season 6. It was probably the most exciting and stressful of all trade deadlines. Minsk beat Paris in the Cup Finals that season and neither did much at the deadline. But other teams were wheeling and dealing and parting with quality guys like crazy. Some examples:

• Berlin acquired future heartthrob and legend Erik Forssell from London for two 2nd-round picks. The Smurfs also traded David Pastrnak and a 1st-round pick to Prague in exchange for eventual franchise centerpiece Ryan Nugent-Hopkins
• Belfast obtained Claude Giroux from Edinburgh for Sidney Crosby, Mikko Rantanen, a 1st-round pick and a 2nd-round pick. The next day, they got Sergei Mozyakin from Geneva for Nazem Kadri, Vladislav Kamenev and a 1st-round pick
• Athens traded Ryan O’Reilly to Moscow for Anze Kopitar
• Brock Boeser went from Moscow to Helsinki for Mitch Marner

Next: Trading during the off season