Per Puck Daddy:
Imagine the surprise across Canada on Saturday night when, during the Hotstove, Elliotte Friedman said that Jay Feaster would in no way consider trading Jarome Iginla to make the team better.
“[Feaster] said Jarome Iginla is part of the solution in Calgary, not part of the problem,” Friedman explained.
Very odd. One thing that’s supposed to be part of a general manager’s job, in any sport, is making tough decisions. Those that aren’t arrived at easily or happily, but which must be pursued (or at least explored) to their fullest extent, in an effort to make sure the team they’re tasked with shaping or improving continues to be competitive.
Usually, the hard decisions in the NHL start coming around now. Thanksgiving in the U.S. is a pretty good delineating point to telling when a team has merely struggled out of the gate or needs a shakeup to have any hope of making the playoffs.
In the case of Iginla, we have a 34-year-old player who used to be elite and now is merely very good, at least in theory. He has just 11 points in 22 games and is a minus-8 for a team that is a whopping four points ahead of Columbus in the standings. He has looked disinterested in the defensive zone — something not often seen from the Flames captain — and punchless in attack.
He is, reportedly, not on the same page as Brent Sutter (though earlier in Hotstove, Eric Francis revealed that letting the coach go after this 9-12-1 start is also not being considered).
And at the same time, the number of teams who would be lined up around the block to acquire him for rafts of picks and/or prospects is likely quite high. Iginla is getting older, not younger, and the clock is ticking on his viability as a trade target. There’s a lot to be said for selling as high as possible, and if Mike Milbury has to step in to be the voice of reason in this whole mess, then things have gone very wrong indeed.
The only solution for the Flames is obvious: Trade Iginla and anyone else who will fetch anything resembling a good price.
The team is going nowhere in a hurry, but trading Iginla would mean two things for Feaster: 1) He’s already running up the white flag on a team which he said repeatedly and unequivocally over the summer could make the playoffs, and 2) He’d forever be The Guy Who Traded Jarome Iginla.
And imagine if the prospects and picks he got for the best Calgary Flame ever didn’t pan out five years down the line? Hoo boy.
