Preds (fairly) quiet on trade deadline day

Well, the Predators have be laying low (so far) on trade deadline day.

UPDATE: We just traded for Jan Hlavac (pronounced hull-A-vich)(formerly of the Lightning, Rangers, Hurricanes, Canucks, and Flyers). Only had to give up a 7th round pick to do it too. Not too bad. He comes on the super-cheap (he was on a one-year $700k deal and is an unrestricted free agent at the end of the year. Don't know much about him...but he is certainly not a star player. Will probably be able to spell Gelinas well enough. He's 31 years old and has obviously been around the block, though it doesn't look like he's ever been a great producer and only has 5 games of playoff experience with Vancouver. His best year was his second in the league in 2000-2001 when he racked up 28 goals and 36 assist in 79 games with the Rangers. It was quickly down hill after that though as his performance has been a consistent 20-something points per year in and average of 60-70 games annually. More concerning is his plus/minus (-9, -8, -10 for the last three years). So...we'll see...

UPDATE 2: and now we've picked up Brandon Bochenski from the Ducks. Barely worth commenting on here. He's played in a whopping 32 games this year, and just 113 games in his 3 year career. High point for this guy was last year's 13 goals, 11 assists in 41 games. Meh. Good news is that we only gave up "future considerations" which i'm hoping is the proverbial "bag of pucks and a 12th round pick in 2010" :-) Interestingly, he is a restricted free agent (as opposed to the typical un-restricted free agent "rental players") at the end his whopping one-year $600k contract this year, so we could conceivably re-sign him if he turns out to be some sort of wonder.

Now back to my previous comments.

I have to say i'm pretty disappointed that we missed out on Prospal, especially given how cheap he went for...but i'm not at all regretting Poile not going for the high-priced guys like Hossa, Richards, Campbell, or even Federov, Ruutu, Simon and others.

We "need" to pickup another forward (update: see above), but given what teams are giving up, and given how insanely beefed up Dallas, San Jose, Colorado, and even Anaheim and Pittsburgh are looking...i'm content to just see what we can do with what we have, draft well next year, and grab a few free agents in the off season (update: which we basically did).

The Preds are still a team on a budget (though thankfully not Leipold's) and Poile knows he's going to be able to put a better team together with 'value' veterans, prospects, and role-players. As has been discussed before, Trotz does better with those types than the superstars anyway.

So... for all you Predator fans looking for something entertaining on Trade Deadline Day...i leave you with Jordin Tootoo, doing his thing for Jack FM (yet more marketing efforts from new ownership that we never saw from Leipold)