In what’s becoming a recurring theme in these past weeks, the Colorado Avalanche announced today that they’ve made yet another trade, their third in two weeks and second in just two days.
They acquired defenseman Ryan O’Byrne from Montreal in exchange for prospect Michael Bournival on November 11th and yesterday they exchanged D-men with the Boston Bruins, Matt Hunwick coming to the Avs and prospect Colby Cohen headed to Beantown (or more likely, the Providence Bruins of the AHL). Today, they traded away a player that was actually playing with the big club, sending Scott Hannan to Washington in exchange for forward Tomas Fleischmann.
Washington was looking for a sturdy, stay-at-home defenseman that could log some big minutes (something they obviously needed during their last two trips to the Stanley Cup Playoffs), and while we can speculate about the rumors that mused the Capitals were working out a similar deal with the Los Angeles Kings, the end result remains the same: Scott Hannan now plays for the Washington Capitals. They got “their guy.”
In Fleischmann, the Avs receive a highly skilled forward who, for the last couple of years, has kind of been hidden in the shadow of Alex Ovechkin, Niklas Backstrom and Alexander Semin, thus relegated to less minutes which colloquial logic translates to less points.
One would think that if Fleischmann, who is still only 26 years old, were to play with a high caliber center at all times like Paul Stastny or Matt Duchene, he could blossom into a 30-35 a year goal scorer.
While we wish Scott Hannan the best following his somewhat surprising departure from the Mile High City, the offensive attack of this team just keeps getting scarier.
With Chris Stewart, Peter Mueller and T.J. Galiardi all missing time with injuries (broken hand, concussion and a broken wrist, respectively), Avalanche general manager Greg Sherman probably couldn’t have picked a better time to swing this kind of deal.
In theory, Fleischmann will join the Avs and pick up some of the slack left by the aforementioned injuries, and when the players listed above return to the lineup (fingers crossed), the Avalanche could be a real headache for teams trying to shut them down.
The Avalanche host the Atlanta Thrashers tonight. The puck drops at 8:00 PM (Mountain Standard Time) and while I’ve confirmed that new acquisition Matt Hunwick will be in the lineup (possibly for a rematch with Evander Kane? Just kidding. Kind of.), it remains unclear if the Avs most recent acquisition, Tomas Fleischmann will arrive in Denver in time to attend.
If he can’t, and I personally wouldn’t bet on it (in my experience watching hockey, players tend to need a day to get ‘the essentials’ together, fly out to whatever city they’re headed to and a few other factors that could prevent them from getting into the lineup), I’d expect tough guy David Koci to make his season debut (he’s missed all of the Avs games due to a broken jaw and most recently, being a healthy scratch).
You can read the team’s official statement, here.
And you can keep up with Chris on Twitter, here.
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