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 III: The Off Season

We’ve all been there. The season just ended and we didn’t do as well as we would have liked. A lucky few of us might have had very satisfying seasons.

Either way, it was now the off season and time to take stock of who is still with us and what newcomers we would love to hand our sweater to next season. There are four ways to get players in pro hockey: draft them, claim them off waivers, pay them a lot of money as free agents … or get them from another team in a trade.

You can trade the first four months of every season, but you kind of have to do it on the fly with a deadline waiting for you at the end. There are a lot more moving parts in a season: injuries, standings movement, other teams changing personnel through trades … it’s like trying to hit a moving target.

But in the off season, you can kick up your feet, pour a cup of coffee, put down “The Life and Times of Eugene Wilkinson,” log on to the site, and really think things through. In theory, the off season is your best time to make trades and reshape your team. For some franchises, that planning time really pays off.

The off seasons were when former Belfast General Manager Chris Patton plotted his masterpiece of a franchise. The Giants won four Cups in six years (Seasons 4-9), mainly because Patton had a knack for identifying and trading away talent that would soon become unaffordable and getting high-level younger talent in return.

Here are just a few examples of the trades he made that certainly seemed like they would benefit both teams, but definitely paid off for Belfast. At the time, some of these trades seemed crazy:

• Traded Filip Forsberg and Cory Schneider to Munich for Jonathan Quick
• Traded Sidney Crosby, Mikko Rantanen, 2018 Round 1 pick and 2018 Round 2 pick to Edinburgh for Claude Giroux
• Traded Nazem Kadri, Vladislav Kamenev and 2020 Round 1 pick to Geneva for Sergei Mozyakin
• Traded Sergei Mozyakin and Vladimir Tarasenko to St. Petersburg for Jonathan Huberdeau, Tobias Rieder and Jakob Chychrun
• Traded James Neal, Michael Dal Colle, Robert Thomas, 2021 Round 1 pick, 2022 Round 1 pick and 2021 Round 2 pick to Prague for David Pastrnak
• Traded P.K. Subban, Evander Kane, Nardo Nagtzaam, Jacob Larsson, Filip Westerlund and 2023 Round 1 pick to Madrid for Erik Karlsson and Gabriel Landeskog

But off-season plans don’t always work out the way they did for Patton’s Giants.

We’ll go back to the first off season for an example of best-laid plans not materializing. Prague had finished sixth overall but the a new GM (it was either Mylie Joe Page, jstups or Axel Bode) thought the top prize was out of reach so he decided stockpiling first-round draft picks was the best way to perform a profitable remake. He sent five pretty good players packing (Sergei Bobrovsky, Niklas Kronwall, Jason Pominville, Jussi Jokinen and Jay McClement). In return, Prague got five lesser players and four number one picks. Unfortunately the plan – as much sense as it seemed to make – worked about as well as the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres rebuild did when they drafted Jack Eichel second overall.

An interesting side note about that particular off season: Paris made zero moves and won the Season 2 Cup.

The most sought-after trade pieces of all are superstar players and first-round draft picks and those assets are more likely to be dealt in the off season than during the 82-game schedule.

Back to the early days for a great example: between Seasons 4 and 5 there were six trades in which first-round picks were exchanged for established stars:

• Patrick Kane from Zurich to Minsk (with two other players)
• Nikolaj Ehlers from Moscow to Helsinki
• Ryan Suter and Blake Wheeler from Gothenburg to Moscow (for the pick and Kevin Dallman)
• Zach Parise from Gothenburg to Lisbon
• Shea Weber from Copenhagen to Lisbon (with two other players)
• Alexander Ovechkin from Copenhagen to Belfast (with two other players)

That off season also saw what might have been the most exciting man-for-man, straight up deal ever. Edinburgh traded John Tavares to Lisbon for Claude Giroux. Both have had great careers. Tavares is the league’s all-time leading scorer and Giroux is sixth on that list.

And the most recent off season saw Oslo GM Carl Choiniere steal the spotlight with the beginnings of a major makeover. There was some major name dropping going on. Connor McDavid, Matt Murray, Alex Debrincat, Jacob Moverare and Viktor Antipin were among the team’s best players and they all waved bye-bye to Norway. In one of the trades, Choiniere acquired sniper Kyle Connor … for about 7 minutes. He was then packaged up with a pretty bow on top and sent to Minsk for a 1st round pick and a young forward. When the smoke cleared, Oslo had seven new youngsters, four new first-round picks and a new uphill climb ahead of them.

Next: Hidden gems, game-changers and wacky stuff