This week, I’m going to talk about something that has caused me a lot of sadness over the years that no one outside of the junior hockey sphere has probably ever spent considerable time thinking about.  This week, I”m going to talk about the OHL trade market, and the effects it can have on a team and their fans.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that trade deadlines are a big deal in every sport that has them, but I don’t think any other sport or league has as much shuffling as the OHL.  This is likely due to the short time that players have in the league (only five years, from ages 16-20) and the quick turnover rate of junior hockey.  The OHL trade deadline, happening every year in the middle of January, is a rough or exciting time of the year, depending on a teams situation.  Top players, young talent, and eons of draft picks are exchanged in rapid fire, each team trying to get out of this crazy time what is best for their current game plan.

For the teams at the top, this sometimes means selling the farm (future) for a chance at the championship now.  At the end of the Erie Otters championship run last year, we had left ourselves with almost no high picks until the early 2020s and out of some young talent (speciffically Allan McShane, a former first round draft pick).  In exchange, we picked up high powered offensive prospects in Warren Foegle, future Playoff MVP, and Anthony Cirelli, scorer of the championship winning overtime goal, and physical defenceman Cameron Lizotte, or as I lovingly called him, Beardy.

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(This is Beardy.  Makes sense, right?)

This worked out very well for us last year, boosting moral and skill enough to get us that championship win.  This year, however we were in a much different situation.  A bottom dweller in our conference after most of our high powered talent, including all of our “purchases” from last season, have either moved on to higher level play or aged out to college.  This year, we were sellers, trading our best forward in Taylor Raddysh and our two best defencemen in Jordan Sambrook and Mitch Byrne to other teams for young players and tons of draft picks.  At this point in our development, it is still to start re-cultivating the farm.

So uh… do we have a trade to announce? pic.twitter.com/HBaEWj1G2z

— Tom Hunter (@PuckDontLie) January 6, 2018

(This picture of Taylor Raddysh was taken during a trade freeze for players playing in the World Junior Championships, when he knew about the trade but it had yet to be announced.  This tweet crushed all remaining hope I had.  He was the face of this year’s OHL trade market, as a very high impact player on a low level team.)

Watching all of these proceedings go down is very stressful for avid junior hockey fans, and it can leave you with very mixed feelings.  While I know that giving these players a chance to play for another championship now, especially because it allows us to start rebuilding sooner, is the right thing to do, that doesn’t completely remove the sting.  Sometimes, you can’t help but feel like the team management has given up and is writing off the entire season.  It also very much hurts when you get attached to players that are apart of the trades, especially when those trades are unexpected.

I still vividly remember the day my Dad texted me asking if I had “heard the news.”  I frantically searched the Otters website and found out that my favorite player, Brady Austin, was traded away for a very bad goalie.  In the end, this goalie was so bad he was traded away for draft picks and Austin went on to be an NHL draft pick and is currently playing in the league under that, the AHL.  I stand by my viewpoint that this is the worst trade in Otters history.  Based on my continued anger about this trade, you would think this trade had been recent, right?  Oh no.  This all happened in 2011.  Us OHL fans are just kind of crazy. (It’s me. I’m just kind of crazy.)

Overall, the trade market in the OHL can have huge effects on teams and their fans, and this doesn’t even go into the player’s perspective of moving teams and cities in the middle of a season as a teenager.  While necessary, this market is emotional and logistical chaos for teams and fans alike.  But it does give hockey bloggers (like me??) some interesting material to talk about!