The Word on Everyone's Lips...

Trades.

Duck and cover.

With the trade deadline approaching on Feb. 28th, the NHL--and other hockey news sites--are peeing themselves with anticipation and making sure they have "the hottest news".

And since I am a bandwagoner (look at my favorite sports team) therefore, I must follow suit.

Since I am not eloquent in 50 ways to analyze trades, I'll give a quick breakdown of the trades so far. If you just want barebones facts and don't care what I have to say, then the NHL.com Trade Tracker will suffice, I'm sure.

On the trading news, bottom of the league teams seem to be taking advantage of trading away their best players for the promise of early draft picks--because obviously a clone of Wayne Gretzky is ripe for the picking. The teams with the most trades are Maple Leafs (no surprise there), Ottawa Senators (also no surprise) and the Anaheim Ducks. The Hurricanes and Sharks also seem fond of doing business with each other, or maybe their trade coordinators just wish they could quit each other.

Some thoughts I had, in no particular order:

The Islanders were keen on getting goalie Al Montoya (and all 'You killed my Father' jokes aside) to fill the gap Nabokov left when he decided to give them the finger and troll the trolls. No word on how this will affect the "Free Nabby" movement, though there are talks of snaking into the Nassau Veteran's Memorial Coliseum in the dead of night and releasing Nabokov into the wild.

Much anguish was had by Leafs Nation when right wing Kris Versteeg was traded to the Philadelphia Flyers for draft picks. According to Versteeg, the Flyers were warm and welcoming to him, but he does wonder what happened to his 2010 cup ring after he showed it to Carcillio.

Late last night, there was an uproar on the hockey boards around 1 AM Eastern Time, as it had been announced that the St. Louis Blues traded Johnson and McClement to the Colorado Avalanche for Stewart and Shattenkirk. Presumably the trade was made so late on a Friday night in hopes that no one would notice, though they seem to have forgotten that a true hockey fan is still awake on Friday nights, crying and clutching a bottle of liquor and wondering why their team can't have nice things. Thus it was big news for Blues and Avalanche fans, and somewhere between *Kanye shrug* and Duncurr for everyone else.

I might have more thoughts on the trades later, but this is all for right now as I have to nervously bite my fingernails and shake back and forth wondering what the Wings general manager meant when he said "we'll see" about the trade deadline.