In yesterday's blog, we looked at five of the best trades in Flyers history. Today we'll balance it off with a look at the flip side: the five worst trades in franchise history.
In my opinion, three of the five worst deals in club history took place during Bob Clarke's first tenure as general manager. The other two happened during his second tenure (which, it should be noted, was much stronger overall than his first go-round in the post when he simply wasn't ready for it).
Get the Maalox ready when you look back at these five costly deals born of pettiness, panic and/or flat-out misjudgment:
1) Brad McCrimmon to Calgary for 1989 1st Round draft choice (later transferred to Toronto; Steve Bancroft) and 1988 3rd Round draft choice (Dominic Roussel): During the Mike Keenan era, a huge part of the team's success lay in the fact that the Flyers boasted the best defensive pairing in the NHL in Mark Howe and Brad "The Beast" McCrimmon. Their styles meshed together almost perfectly.
However. McCrimmon and Bob Clarke did not like one another on a personal level. Clarke told Jay Greenberg in Full Spectrum that his differences with McCrimmon went back to when Clarke was still an active player and McCrimmon came over to the Flyers in a trade with Boston. Clarke told Greenberg, "He was a big boozer who I didn't think cared."
Clarke was also not a big fan of McCrimmon's agent, Herb Pinder. As a result, he was not inclined to give an inch in negotiations when McCrimmon's contract came up for renegotiation after the end of the 1986-87 season (a year in which McCrimmon had posted 10 goals, 39 points and a plus-45 rating one season after a 13 goal, 56 point, plus-83 campaign).
The McCrimmon camp wanted $250,000 per season for four years. Clarke offered $225,000 and not a penny more. Pinder and Clarke got into a shouting match, and Clarke spitefully reduced the offer the next day to $210,000 for three years. At that point, McCrimmon demanded a trade. On August 26, 1987, the Flyers sent the top-pairing defenseman to Calgary for two draft picks.
Clarke maintained after the fact that he "never got a strong feeling from Keenan" that the coach felt it was critical to keep McCrimmon. The coach later said that he felt it should have been pretty clear that he entrusted a lot of responsibility on the ice to McCrimmon as well as Howe but that he had resigned himself to the fact that Clarke and the player were not going to be able to work out their differences.
McCrimmon's former Flyers teammates -- both then and now -- were enraged by the trade. Many have said that the deal hastened the demise of the Keenan era teams, as it ripped open a hole on the blueline that remained unfilled for many years (pretty much until Chris Pronger arrived).
Many years after the trade, Clarke admitted with characteristic understatement, "In hindsight, it wasn't a good trade. I should have gotten a player instead of draft picks." He also conceded that he had severely underrated McCrimmon's value to the team.
Coupled with a series of poor drafts and subsequent short-sighted trades of Dave Poulin and Brian Propp (see below), the Flyers' fortunes sunk like a stone within a couple years of the ill-fated McCrimmon trade. For his part, McCrimmon went on to win a Stanley Cup in Calgary, posting a plus-43 rating for Terry Crisp's championship squad of 1988-89.
2. Patrick Sharp and Eric Meloche to Chicago for Matt Ellison and a 2006 3rd Round draft choice (transferred to Montreal -- Ryan White) : At the time the trade was made, both Sharp and Ellison were young players struggling to find a regular NHL role. Flyers' coach Ken Hitchcock had pushed Sharp hard and had seen signs of progress, but not enough in his view to entrust the player with a regular role in the lineup. Ellison also needed a change of scenery.
The rest of the story is all too familiar to Flyers fans. Sharp has gone on to be an All-Star in Chicago. Ellison has also gone on to be an impact player -- as an import forward in the KHL.
This deal has to make the bottom five list because the results turned out to be so lopsided. At the time it was made, however, it seemed like a reasonably even exchange. The fifth deal on the list was pretty much the opposite. That one made the list because the Flyers traded away way too much at the time, even though the impact in hindsight was minimal.
3. Dave Poulin to Boston for Ken Linseman: Apart from Clarke himself, Poulin was the best captain in franchise history. The series of panicky, short-sighted decisions that led to the "C" being taken away from Poulin and, midway through the 1989-90 season, being traded to Boston remain inexplicable to this day.
Poulin was a bit injury prone and his offensive game was slowly starting to decline. However, he was still one of the NHL's premier penalty killers and faceoff men -- and was still a reasonably solid offensive player at that point. The club was struggling in the standings and scuffling for goals.
Clarke's "solution" was a straight up trade to bring an aging Ken "the Rat" Linseman back to Philadelphia in the hopes that the 32-year-old player could rekindle the days when he routinely posted 75 to 92 points per season. When the deal was run by then-coach Paul Holmgren, the reception was less than keen.
"I was open to moving Dave," Holmgren said in Full Spectrum, "but I wasn't really down on him. And I knew I didn't want to trade him for Linseman. Clarkie told me to get [assistant coaches] Andy Murray and Mike Eaves and talk it over, but I couldn't get them right away. About an hour later, Clarkie called me and told be the deal was done."
Linseman lasted just 29 games in his second Philadelphia stint (5 goals, 14 points, 30 PIM). The Flyers missed the playoffs, and soon ended up with absolutely zero to show for having dealt away their captain.
Poulin, meanwhile, was a valuable cog in the wheel of a Boston team that went on to the Stanley Cup Final. In the regular season with Boston, he posted 25 points in 32 games while playing his usual stellar defense. In the playoffs, he had 8 goals and 13 points in 18 games. He also donned an A on his jersey and stepped right into the Bruins' leadership group. He went on to play three more seasons in Boston and two in Washington before his retirement; missing a lot of time due to injury but remaining a valuable defensive center as his offensive responsibilities continued to diminish.
4. Brian Propp to Boston for a 1990 2nd Round draft pick (Terran Sandwith): A little less than two months after the Flyers traded Poulin to Boston, the club dealt another player who was key to their success in the 1980s. On March 1, 1990, the Flyers sent five-time All-Star winger Brian Propp to the Bruins.
By that point of the 1989-90 season, the Flyers knew they weren't making the playoffs. Clarke thought the 31-year-old Propp (who had been limited to 40 games and slumped to 13 goals and 28 points) was nearing the end of the line in his career. It also didn't help that the player's contract was set to expire at the end of the year and Propp wanted a new multi-year deal. So Propp himself was not exactly heartbroken at the thought of parting ways with the Flyers after more than a decade on the team.
In Clarke's words, "It was the right time for Brian [to go]. And I was glad it was to Boston. He was a good player for this organization for a long time, and I thought sending him to a good team might salvage his career."
Clarke's generosity may have been appreciated by Propp and the Bruins but it did absolutely nothing to help the Philadelphia Flyers. Only the previous season, Propp had led the Flyers in scoring. He was not finished as a productive player in the NHL.
Upon his arrival in Boston, he posted 12 points in the final 14 games and then added 13 points in 20 playoff games as the Bruins reached the Final. The next season, he joined the Minnesota North Stars and returned to the Final again, compiling 73 points in 79 regular season games and 23 points in 23 playoff tilts.
Terran Sandwith, the player whom the Flyers chose with the 2nd round pick sent over by Boston, spent two-plus seasons with the team's AHL affiliate in Hershey without earning a callup to the big club (in a period where the club had a revolving door of defensemen and tried just about anyone in the system with a pulse). He later appeared in 8 NHL games with Edmonton before returning to the minors and making several stops in Europe.
After the 1989-90 season, the Flyers fired Clarke as the GM. He was soon hired by Minnesota, where Propp was among his players on the club that made a surprise trip to the Final in 1991.
5) Maxime Ouellet, 2002 1st Round draft pick (transferred to Dallas - Martin Vagner), 2002 2nd Round draft pick (Maxime Daigneault), and a 2002 3rd Round draft pick (Derek Krestanovich) to Washington for Adam Oates: People who say this trade wasn't so bad in retrospect because neither Ouellet nor any of the players selected with the traded picks ended up coming back to haunt the Flyers are missing the point. This trade was absolutely horrific asset management that arose from sheer panic.
The trade was made because the playoffs were right around the corner and the Flyers had recently lost both of their top two centers (Jeremy Roenick and Keith Primeau) to injuries the club feared were serious enough to jeopardize their ability to play down the stretch and into the postseason. As it turned out, both guys came back -- at far less than 100 percent but they still played.
Even considering the circumstances and the Hall of Fame worthy playmaking (and faceoff) talents of Adam Oates, there was simply no way to justify the king's ransom that the Flyers paid. Oates was 39 years old and an impeding unrestricted free agent. In order to rent him for about six weeks, the Flyers traded away their top prospect at the time, and first-round, second-round and third-round picks in that summer's draft.
It doesn't matter that
Ouellet's stock dropped precipitously with a year or two of the trade. It also doesn't matter what became of the picks once they were sent away. What mattered was that the team had spent two premium assets -- a player who was then considered a future number one goalie and a first-round pick -- on a rental of a player who didn't even fill either of the club's greatest areas of need. The Flyers needed a healthy and reliable defenseman and they needed another player or two who could score goals. Oates was a passer, not a scorer.
Plain and simple, it's pretty tough to manage trade assets much worse than dealing from a position of weakness and emptying your bullets on a rental player whom it soon it turned out the team didn't really need.
Oates did OK in his very brief stint as a Flyer. Seven helpers and 10 points in 14 regular season games down the stretch wasn't anything spectacular for a player of his stature but it wasn't bad. In the playoffs, the Flyers scored just two goals in the entire series in their five-game loss to Ottawa. Oates assisted on both of them. He was basically a non-factor in the series but other Flyers players were far worse. After the season, he was gone.
Philadelphia Flyers Blogger •NHL.com • 
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